We’re in the midst of a historic transformation in how people live and work. Highly distributed and digitally dependent employees and customers demand always-on access to the applications and services they need and want—no matter when or where. At the same time, business leaders require excellent digital experiences, with customer loyalty, brand awareness, and revenue on the line.
But assuring digital experiences across distributed architectures and network domains both within and beyond the IT perimeter is fraught with challenges. One is that monitoring owned and unowned networks often utilize different approaches, resulting in disparate datasets and fragmented visibility that creates inefficiencies and delays resolution of business-impacting issues. Future-proofing the modern workplace and delivering optimized customer experience requires a new approach to assurance and digital resilience.
Since its inception, ThousandEyes has been on a mission to close visibility gaps for both owned and unowned networks, with automated insights, proactive recommendations, and closed-loop operations as central pillars in empowering operations teams to optimize performance and mitigate disruptions.
This week at Cisco Live Amsterdam, ThousandEyes is giving customers access to a private preview of Traffic Insights, an innovation that extends ThousandEyes visibility into owned network domains, helping network teams understand network behavior and its impacts on end-user experience with greater granularity, precision, and context. Details on the private preview can be found below.
In addition, a newly-released “Cisco ThousandEyes App for Splunk” is now available in Splunkbase, while Cisco is introducing an enhanced ThousandEyes onboarding experience for Cisco Catalyst Center customers—all in the name of helping organizations to assure experiences for every user across every domain.
The ThousandEyes app for Splunk gives joint customers an easier way to integrate ThousandEyes data into Splunk’s platform, improving time to value and adding critical digital experience context to Splunk’s dashboards. New streamlined onboarding for Catalyst Center customers will make it easier than ever for customers to redeem their ThousandEyes entitlements to rapidly gain deep visibility across owned and unowned environments.
Cisco Live attendees can learn more and experience these innovations and more through presentations and live product demos throughout the week. In the meantime, in this blog we’ll detail how Traffic Insights makes it simple for network teams to quickly pinpoint issues within the network and reduce time to remediate. So, let’s dive in.
The Need for Deep, Correlated Visibility
The collection of tools and monitoring solutions used by teams to manage enterprise networks have traditionally involved a combination of passive techniques such as collection and analysis of flow data, and others based on active monitoring in the form of synthetic tests.
While passive monitoring and synthetics are both valuable, they address distinct use cases, solve different problems, and produce disparate datasets that are not easily combined to identify and remediate issues within those networks.
Flow analysis, including NetFlow, the popular network management protocol invented by Cisco, is widely-used for network troubleshooting, traffic engineering, trend analysis, and capacity planning. Network synthetics, which simulate user traffic to identify network issues, provide visibility into the layer 3 path from application to end user while also measuring end-to-end, as well as hop-by-hop, performance along that path.
The problem is that flow and synthetics are a bit like oil and vinegar—they don’t blend easily. Disparities in their respective data structures, as well as differences in how they’re used—flow collection is a reactive technique while synthetics are used proactively—make the two datasets difficult to correlate into a cohesive and comprehensive picture of network performance, which creates visibility gaps for those responsible for managing the network.
For example, flow data can tell you if your network is over-utilized, but can’t on its own attribute slow application performance to excessive utilization. Synthetics can reveal exactly where packet loss is occurring along the network path, but can’t specifically identify the traffic that’s causing it. These disparities make it challenging for teams to gain a complete and accurate view, which impedes their ability to quickly address issues that occur on their networks. This is the problem that motivated ThousandEyes to develop Traffic Insights.
Traffic Insights enables NetOps teams to move quickly from detecting performance issues to attributing those issues to specific network traffic or applications. It streamlines troubleshooting workflows, accelerates root cause identification, and reduces time to remediate without the need for multiple tools or manual correlation.
Automated Correlation of Flow and Synthetics
The amount of time and effort needed to correlate flow and synthetic data into an accurate and actionable assessment of root cause is a central challenge for NetOps teams. Simply put, manual correlation impedes troubleshooting. Traffic Insights solves this in unique fashion by automatically correlating data from ThousandEyes synthetic tests with flow data (NetFlow or IPFIX) collected and forwarded from ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents.
With Traffic Insights, NetOps teams can quickly and clearly identify the traffic associated with packet loss or latency at the node level. Support for Cisco’s network-based application recognition (NBAR) enhances this even further by classifying flows according to the applications that generate them.
This additional level of detail can help NetOps quickly identify specific application traffic impeding network throughput and consequently degrading user experience.
Simplified Workflows Through a Powerful User Interface
The use of multiple tools or solutions to understand causal relationships between usage data and end-to-end performance translates to NetOps teams consuming valuable time switching between consoles and manually correlating datasets to piece together root cause determination.
Traffic Insights offers a simpler, more streamlined approach, making it easy to quickly see how loss or latency is impacted by specific applications, users, or locations. Within a single console session, operators can view the traffic associated with a network node experiencing performance degradation simply by hovering over the node within a path visualization and clicking to access the intuitive Traffic Insights View screen.
With Traffic Insights, NetOps can easily visualize and assess usage trends and patterns over a 30-day window, including before, during, and after network incidents. Seeing these changes over time makes it possible to verify which traffic was at the root of a given incident as it happened, as well as what it looked like before and after. Extensive filtering and the ability to quickly sort and view flow records makes it easy to pinpoint exactly what’s causing degradation, and customizable dashboards provide instant visibility to traffic across the enterprise network.
Simple, Scalable Visibility Across the Enterprise
Gaining network-wide traffic visibility with Traffic Insights is easy with support for NetFlow and IPFIX collection and forwarding built into the ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent. Network devices configured to support these, and even third-party collectors already deployed on the network can send flow data to the ThousandEyes agent, which in turn forwards it to the ThousandEyes platform where it’s correlated with the corresponding synthetic data and presented within the ThousandEyes portal.
ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents can operate as virtual or physical appliances, or can be integrated directly onto Cisco networking devices, making it easy to activate Traffic Insights at locations where an Enterprise Agent is deployed. This utilizes a straightforward configuration workflow within the ThousandEyes portal, dramatically reducing the effort needed for teams to gain visibility into network usage at more locations while also making it easy to view traffic specifically at those locations within Traffic Insights views.
Traffic Insights also offers operational benefits through customizable alerts that allow teams to respond immediately and decisively when traffic levels spike to undesirable levels beyond traffic-specific thresholds. Alerts also integrate easily with a wide range of ITSM platforms through built-in integrations or custom webhooks.
Traffic Insights: A Game Changer for NetOps
Combined with the visibility into unowned networks and services offered by the ThousandEyes platform, Traffic Insights takes end-to-end assurance to the next level by giving network teams a deeper contextual understanding of which applications, end users, or networks are impacting the performance of enterprise applications and end-user experiences.
With a unique approach to leveraging network usage data that simplifies operations and accelerates troubleshooting, no other solution in the market combines this level of sophisticated functionality, flexibility, and ease of integration.
Get Started Right Away With Traffic Insights
To learn more about Traffic Insights, visit the ThousandEyes booth at Cisco Live Amsterdam, or read more about it on our website.
Current ThousandEyes customers can gain access to Traffic Insights today through the fully supported private preview available in the ThousandEyes platform. Simply reach out to your ThousandEyes or Cisco account team, or contact us to get started.
Note: Some of the products and features described herein remain in varying stages of development and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. The delivery timeline of these products and features is subject to change at the sole discretion of Cisco, and Cisco will have no liability for delay in the delivery or failure to deliver any of the products or features set forth in this document.