ThousandEyes Enriches the Visibility of Multi-Cloud Environments

ThousandEyes extended its network monitoring technology so it now supports multi-cloud environments. The company deployed Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vantage points into every region of the top three cloud providers. This includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As more enterprises spread their networks across multiple public clouds it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor with traditional monitoring tools. These traditional tools typically rely on packet capture, flow, and Simple Network Management Platform (SNMP), but this leaves network blind spots. Most enterprises in multi-cloud environments rely on native monitoring tools of the cloud providers, but these don’t provide visibility into cloud-based application delivery and inter-service communication between the clouds on service delivery paths. ThousandEyes VP of Product Marketing Alex Henthorn-Iwane said that the main monitoring issue with multi-cloud environments is the lack of correlated data. “It has reached this level of lack of correlation, lack of data put together by the cloud arena and all of the networks in between,” he said. “It pushes some [network operations] teams to the breaking point I think.” ThousandEyes monitoring technology relies on cloud, enterprise, and endpoint agents deployed in customers’ networks. Cloud agents are deployed in colocation data centers and enterprise agents in branch offices and data centers. According to Henthorn-Iwane, customers have been using enterprise agents within their public cloud deployments to monitor application and network layers, as well as deep internet routing and DNS. These agents collect data to give interactive snapshots of the network. With the addition of these cloud vantage points into AWS, Azure, and GCP it enables agent-to-agent tests between cloud agents and enterprise agents already deployed in the customers network. IT teams can then monitor and measure the performance between cloud regions, as well as hybrid and inter-cloud performance. The system of agents and vantage points enable the mapping of paths and monitors the connectivity between data centers, both on premises and in the cloud.