Cisco's ThousandEyes takes an even closer look at local networks and the cloud
Cisco's monitoring tool ThousandEyes is getting all kinds of new features, including better visibility in AWS cloud environments.
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- Benjamin Pfister
At the Cisco Live in-house exhibition in Las Vegas, Cisco presented the next stage of the quality monitoring and troubleshooting tool ThousandEyes. In addition to the monitoring functions, Cisco now wants to expand visibility in AWS cloud environments, passively collect data flows and integrate the Meraki cloud network service bidirectionally.
The new ThousandEyes Traffic Insights is intended to expand visibility in local networks by passively collecting traffic patterns via Netflow in addition to the agents' own active measurements and correlating them with their own measurements. This should enable users to detect performance problems and anomalies even faster. According to Cisco, the traffic patterns should also be detectable by third-party network components.
Meraki integration
Cisco integrates cloud-managed WLAN and LAN components from Meraki via ThousandEyes Endpoint Experience. For example, WLAN reception problems of the client can be identified more easily based on data from Meraki access points. The device information and telemetry from the network gives customers an even more profound insight, enabling them to recognize impairments better and resolve them more quickly.
On the other hand, the Meraki dashboard, i.e. the management interface of the cloud network solution, has an Assurance Overview Dashboard that integrates ThousandEyes directly. There is no longer any need to switch between platforms. This should enable customers to gain a direct insight into the performance of the network and identify any faults in the Meraki dashboard without having to switch environments. By integrating the Meraki MX firewalls into ThousandEyes, it is now also possible to create and subsequently monitor connectivity checks on firewalls directly via the Meraki dashboard.
Finding the causes of connection errors more easily
Cisco is also addressing the topic of cloud monitoring with ThousandEyes Cloud Insights. It is designed to provide graphical representations of each customer's AWS environments and display connectivity to and between services, configuration changes and traffic characteristics. For example, the administrator should be able to identify at a glance the cause of faulty connections to their own services hosted in AWS, such as faulty load balancers, databases or web services. Discarded data traffic due to policies in AWS, top talkers in the network and VPC flow logs are also visible.
By displaying the end-to-end network paths, the original cause of faults can be identified more quickly, even in combination with cloud environments. Cisco announced in an interview that the integration of other cloud platforms such as Azure and Google Cloud is being planned. This should lead to a multicloud view of the network to detect errors in the data transmission of multicloud networks more quickly.
All announcements for ThousandEyes at Live can be found on the Cisco blog.
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