The adoption of multi-cloud strategies has become a cornerstone of modern IT architecture, enabling organizations to utilize the best features of different cloud providers while driving flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency. However, this approach also introduces a host of challenges, ranging from operational complexity to vendor lock-in risks. Without the right solutions, managing a multi-cloud environment can quickly become overwhelming—hindering performance, increasing risk, and undermining the very benefits it promises.
To help organizations navigate these complexities, we are introducing ThousandEyes Cloud Insights for Microsoft Azure, now part of our comprehensive multi-cloud monitoring solution. With the addition of Microsoft Azure support, ThousandEyes Cloud Insights provides deep visibility into multi-cloud environments, empowering IT teams with actionable insights to help ensure digital resilience, seamless service delivery, and an exceptional end-user experience.
Additionally, Cloud Insights will be delivering Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, a critical feature that extends visibility into dedicated private connections between on-premises infrastructure and Azure, by the end of this month. This enhancement enables organizations to proactively monitor and optimize these connections, delivering enterprise-grade reliability and performance for mission-critical applications.
Next, let’s explore the top challenges organizations face in multi-cloud environments and how Cloud Insights, with its support for both AWS and Azure cloud providers, addresses them.
Challenge #1: Ongoing Organization-driven Cloud Optimizations
Organizations continuously optimize their cloud environments to balance costs, performance, and resource utilization across multiple clouds. These efforts often involve shifting workloads between cloud providers, adopting new cloud services, or resizing deployments to meet evolving business needs. However, these optimizations can disrupt performance or create visibility gaps, making it difficult for IT, Cloud Operations (Cloud Ops), and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams to assess the impact of these changes effectively.
How Cloud Insights Solves Optimization Challenges
Cloud Insights provides a unified, real-time view of application delivery paths, spanning from on-premises infrastructure to cloud environments and the Internet. This comprehensive level of visibility enables IT teams to:
- Monitor the impact of optimizations: Measure performance before and after changes to help ensure optimizations deliver the expected benefits without disrupting critical services.
- Identify bottlenecks: Pinpoint areas where optimizations may inadvertently introduce latency, degraded performance, or reduced availability—whether the issue lies in the public Internet, a cloud provider, or an ExpressRoute connection.
- Proactively plan changes: Use historical and real-time data to benchmark cloud performance and anticipate how workload migrations, including large-scale migrations using ExpressRoute, or resource adjustments will affect overall performance.
By offering granular insights into the performance of cloud networks and applications, Cloud Insights empowers organizations to make data-driven optimization decisions with confidence, providing seamless service delivery and user satisfaction.
Figure 1. Troubleshooting throughput changes caused by configuration updates
Challenge #2: Mitigating Multi-cloud Management Complexity
Managing a multi-cloud environment requires Cloud Ops teams to juggle disparate tools, APIs, dashboards, and architectures. Each cloud provider operates within its own ecosystem, making it challenging to maintain consistent performance standards. This level of complexity not only increases operational overhead but also heightens the risk of errors, which can result in downtime or vulnerabilities.
Simplifying Multi-cloud Management With Cloud Insights
Cloud Insights simplifies multi-cloud management by delivering a single pane of glass for monitoring performance across all cloud providers and the networks that connect them. Key capabilities include:
- Unified monitoring: Consolidate performance data from cloud providers into one platform, eliminating the need for separate monitoring tools. With support for both AWS and Azure, Cloud Insights centralizes performance metrics in one intuitive dashboard.
- End-to-end visibility: Map the entire application delivery chain, including ExpressRoute links, from users to cloud-hosted services, enabling IT teams to identify and address issues no matter where they occur.
- Simplified troubleshooting: Quickly isolate problems to specific providers, regions, or network segments, reducing the time and effort required for resolution.
By reducing the operational complexity of managing multiple clouds, Cloud Insights enables Cloud Ops teams to focus on strategic initiatives instead of spending their time firefighting performance issues.
Figure 2. Correlating configuration and operational changes to cloud inventory
Challenge #3: Addressing Vendor Lock-in and Interoperability Issues
One of the key motivations behind adopting a multi-cloud strategy is avoiding over-reliance on a single cloud provider. However, achieving true interoperability between providers is easier said than done. Proprietary technologies, differing APIs, and incompatible architectures often create operational silos, while the risk of vendor lock-in becomes a concern if workloads or data become overly dependent on a specific provider’s ecosystem.
Enabling Vendor Independence With Cloud Insights
Cloud Insights addresses these concerns by providing neutral, vendor-agnostic visibility into cloud performance and connectivity. This enables organizations to:
- Assess vendor performance: Compare performance metrics across cloud providers to determine which services are best suited for specific workloads or regions.
- Increase portability: Gain insights into network dependencies and data flows, making it easier to migrate workloads between providers while minimizing service disruptions.
- Hold vendors accountable: Use objective performance data to verify that cloud providers are meeting their service-level agreements (SLAs) and delivering consistent quality.
By addressing the challenges of vendor lock-in and lack of interoperability, Cloud Insights helps organizations maintain the flexibility and independence necessary for a successful multi-cloud strategy.
Figure 3. Unified management of AWS and Azure services within Views
Achieving Multi-cloud Success With ThousandEyes Cloud Insights
Multi-cloud environments offer immense potential, but they also demand advanced solutions to manage complexity, maintain performance, and mitigate risk. Cloud Insights is uniquely positioned to address these needs by delivering:
- Comprehensive multi-cloud coverage: Unified monitoring for AWS, Azure, and other major cloud providers.
- Proactive monitoring: Detect and address issues before they impact users or business operations.
- Actionable insights: Use data-driven intelligence to make strategic decisions about cloud usage, optimizations, and migrations.
Your Next Step to Multi-cloud Success
Experience the power of ThousandEyes Cloud Insights firsthand. Here's how you can get started:
- For current Private Preview customers: The Private Preview phase concludes today, and we encourage you to continue using Cloud Insights as you have been.
- For current ThousandEyes customers:
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- With a Cloud Insights Essentials License: Contact your account team to explore multi-cloud environments.
- With a Cloud Insights Advantage License: Use your current license to set up additional cloud environments.
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- For ThousandEyes customers without Cloud Insights: Start a free 30-day Cloud Insights trial directly in the ThousandEyes platform and purchase a license after the trial if needed.
- For new customers: Sign up for a free trial of the ThousandEyes platform, which includes a free Cloud Insights trial.
Ready to See Cloud Insights in Action?
Watch our demo today to discover how ThousandEyes Cloud Insights can transform your multi-cloud strategy, enhance digital resilience, and deliver an exceptional user experience.
