Built on three agent types, global ThousandEyes cloud agents and enterprise and endpoint agents deployed in customer networks, tests are created to reveal all aspects of connectivity and dependencies between selected points, providing data for benchmarking performance, managing the digital experience and diagnosing problems. Tests will reflect a customer's need for application insight, creating very specific data to help network and security teams be effective.

The Internet, sitting between endpoints and service instances is without boundaries, constantly changing, chaotic, and unpredictable: its service providers are virtually unaccountable. But the requirement for organisations to comply with SLAs, regulation, and legislation, and to deliver an acceptable digital experience, persists.

Internet Insights measures six elements of the Internet Wild West (ISPs, CDNs, DNS providers, SeCaaS, IaaS and UCaaS) and these are typically segregated geographically, creating for example, ISP EMEA. Using data collected by global agents, the complex and rapidly changing results are critical for managing network connectivity effectively.

The agents gather anonymised Internet performance data from 8 billion data points daily which doubles every six months, illustrating complexity. To deploy Internet Insights you decide which data you require and access Internet Insights by logging into your account at ThousandEyes.com, selecting it from the left-hand panel. It usually presents useful information within ten minutes.

Processed insight can be accessed either by drilling down from a macro Internet level view or navigating upwards from a test. While gathered data is at the heart of this capability, it is the ThousandEyes translation that yields insightful and actionable information.

Our Insight view presented an adjustable 24-hour timeline showing an activity graph, a world map with colour coded icons indicating where outages or events were detected, mouse hover and panel data offering IP addresses, DNS, location and the number of tests, and an expandable topology map.

We selected a node showing 21 incidents and could not only detect the problem but visualise its blast radius: any of our services routing through here might be affected. This insight allowed us to conclude that we needed to change BGP peering and define a new route to bypass the blast radius. This is an example of a problem that is very definitely off premise and not visible to traditional performance management telemetry and toolsets, and one that would be difficult to engage with meaningfully with the carriers and service providers involved. Digital users just can't wait SLA hours on the off chance that a router can be replaced or reconfigured.

Internet Insight is so much more than a fault finding tool and it requires an evolved mindset to reveal its true potential; in fact this solution might identify problems presently hidden. Those responsible for WAN services, cloud adoption and security will quickly benefit. Similarly those planning, deploying, securing and managing networks will identify substantial use cases. For example, an organisation opening up its business into a new market can observe ISP performance and select partners using benchmarked facts.

Internet Insight provides independently verifiable information with significant operational, forensic, contractual and legal value. A modern digital organisation with limited networking skills may use it to manage service providers: its applications are endless.

Knowledge is central to planning and deployment and time to knowledge is often too long for operational problems. Internet Insight provides access to a seam of near real-time data and manipulates it to provide the insight and capability to reduce the time to know a problem and confidently deliver the best possible digitally transformed services, based on a full visibility of Internet global health. NC

Product: Internet Insights
Supplier: ThousandEyes
Web site: www.thousandeyes.com
Contact: www.thousandeyes.com/contact
Price: Based on scope of requirements