One of the scariest moments in a network engineer’s life is when they realize that the errors are not in their network, but outside the enterprise, either on the Internet or somewhere in the cloud. What follows are some frantic calls to family and friends canceling dinner plans, vacations, bike rides and putting life on hold. That’s followed by the frantic opening of support tickets with your ISPs, your cloud providers and your SaaS vendors, all of whom will eventually toss the proverbial hot potato right back at you and tell you “it’s not us, it’s you”. But you have to do it anyway, so that you cover all your bases. Somewhere along the way you inform your boss and the business that you don’t know what the root cause is because your network looks clean, and they believe you. Just kidding – they don’t actually believe you. Did I say innocent until proven guilty? I meant guilty until proven innocent.
So you pull up your command prompt and traceroute your way through the Internet, like a machete-wielding explorer hacking through the jungles. You find chalk markings and footprints, but you’re not really sure if that’s the path your application traffic takes. So you guess, and you improvise and you piece together a Visio diagram of what you think is happening, and try to convince your providers that the errors are actually coming from their network. And they believe you (???).
This is a familiar story that plays out in IT organizations and war rooms all over the world. As enterprise IT moves to the cloud and SaaS, network infrastructure teams have the added pleasure of being the clearinghouse for all application issues, regardless of whether the application lives within an enterprise data center, or somewhere out in the cloud. What you need is visibility into networks and applications you don’t control, so you can pinpoint root cause, gather evidence and escalate effectively with your provider.
ThousandEyes takes the horror out of external dependencies by showing you any network like it’s your own. Shine a light on problem spots regardless of whether they are inside or outside your enterprise. Collaborate with your providers, prove your innocence, and return to your regularly scheduled life without fear.
If you haven’t tried ThousandEyes yet, take advantage of our 15-day free trial and make your network life a little less spooktacular.
