Visibility Into External Dependencies

Multi-layered visibility of service dependencies, APIs, and VPNs.

I had the opportunity to speak to Angelique Medina, Director of Product Marketing at ThousandEyes to get an idea of the product updates they’ve been making and to understand how they are being integrated into Cisco’s offerings.

Angelique explained the need for enterprises, including Cisco, to have visibility into external dependencies, particularly at the application-level.

ThousandEyes is now paired with Cisco’s network monitoring to provide internet insights across all data. They are able to collect intelligence to surface outages in the internet or cloud -- a 10,000-foot view across the internet. This is particularly relevant today as most people are working from home and are dealing with the inconsistent performance of their home network.

The ThousandEyes agent has been deployed on millions of endpoint devices over the last six months. ThousandEyes and Cisco are deepening the correlation across datasets to aggregate views across all platforms for cross-layer visibility.

ThousandEyes is also working with AppDynamics to complete visibility into the application layer. They’re able to see all API services on the backend which is critical for e-commerce companies and sites.

ThousandEyes has just launched three key capabilities to provide visibility across complex digital supply chains, modern application architectures, and remote work environments to ease consumption for SREs, DevOps, and application owners.

1. Multi-service views build on ThousandEyes’ multi-layered visibility by enabling multiple services to be aggregated into a single visualization of every service dependency for a digital workflow by grouping multiple tests to triangulate and isolate performance degradation that is impacting the end-to-end digital experience.
   

2. Adaptive API monitoring by using the synthetic transaction engine to provide monitoring of API transactions to dynamically measure and test UX-impacting, critical workflow, and backend interactions between an application and external API endpoints, including availability, performance, and application logic.
   

3. Expanded VPN visibility to support a secure workforce by automatically detecting and configuring visibility into VPN or zero-trust services within path visualization and provide detailed metrics and views for the overlay and underlay paths through network services. Customers can now diagnose issues for remote workers between the users, VPN concentrators, and target applications.

As most workforces are working from home, this has highlighted the need for internet connectivity, secure edge connectivity, and knowledge about how security is performing.

VPN concentrators in the public cloud need to quickly scale up without being on-site and rolling out new hardware. This shows the value of using cloud services.

ThousandEyes has recognized the reality of where enterprises are - cloud, agility, how services are consumed. Enterprises demand more flexibility, SOA, and best of breed API services to move faster as a business. Businesses today have realized the need to work with things they don’t own, like clouds and APIs, but are critical components of the business.

ThousandEyes helps customers move to the cloud with confidence by giving them a vision into what’s happening.