For organizations with a global presence, gaining visibility into Internet connectivity and performance within China has long been a blindspot, especially with cloud environments. Opaque sovereign controls and notoriously unpredictable Internet access contribute to wide application performance inconsistencies in the region. As organizations continue to invest in multi-cloud ecosystems, their reliance on the Internet and cloud infrastructure is growing increasingly mission-critical. Today, it’s important to monitor your digital experience from public cloud vantage points within China to understand regional user experience.
New Cloud Network Vantage Points in Asia Pacific
Over the last year, we expanded our fleet of Cloud Agents beyond the 14 agents already deployed in China to include 19 additional Alibaba Cloud regions, of which 7 of those regions are located in China. This brought ThousandEyes Asia-Pacific vantage points to a total of 53 cities and global vantage points to 184 cities. By adding Alibaba Cloud deployments into this mix, organizations leveraging any combination of Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) have the ability to measure and visualize app and network-layer performance metrics in real-time on a cloud-to-cloud, Internet-to-cloud and inter-region basis.
This month, we’re proud to introduce a dozen new Cloud Agents across multiple providers within China. These new Cloud Agents are positioned to monitor cloud workloads in vantage points across the following locations and providers ramping the number of Cloud Agents in China to 25 (Figure 1). If you are delivering services to China, you can leverage the new vantage points to monitor and measure performance and the impact of Internet delivery in these regions:
- Beijing, China (China Telecom)
- Beijing, China (China Mobile)
- Changsha, China (China Mobile)
- Dalian, China (China Unicom)
- Chongqing, China (China Mobile)
- Guangzhou, China (China Unicom)
- Ningbo, China (China Mobile)
- Shanghai, China (China Unicom)
- Shenzhen, China (China Unicom)
- Shenzhen, China (China Mobile)
- Tianjin, China (China Mobile)
- Zhengzhou, China (China Mobile)
Where You Monitor from Matters
While shifting preferences toward cloud services promises ubiquitous access to applications and services, it also brings a deeper reliance on the Internet—an Internet that is built upon a complex web of dependencies, like BGP, ISPs and CDNs. Particularly in China, you need to consider regional nuances of how you deliver digital experiences while monitoring from vantage points that are representative of your users in the region. Here are three factors to consider:
- Monitor from where your users are. Quite often, organizations monitor digital experience from tools that are hosted by a particular cloud provider, such as in AWS. However, this is not going to give you an accurate representation of user visibility because users do not sit in cloud providers. When you’re monitoring digital experience, especially on a global level, you really need to have vantage points from the perspective of your users.
- Consider the geographical scope of your testing. From a global scale, you'll want to consider how the Internet performance in the markets you serve could influence the digital experience of your users. It can be easy to overlook, for instance, the Internet connectivity and availability differences that exist between geographic regions. By leveraging regional cloud vantage points, you’ll get a better sense of how local ISPs and CDNs affect the performance of your services.
- Use the ISP tiers your consumers will be using. It happens all too often that businesses measure digital experience from Tier 1 ISP vantage points. However, we know that users (consumers) don't sit at the most central places of the global Internet infrastructure. Instead, your consumers connect to business- and consumer-class ISPs. That's why you need to monitor from vantage points that are connected to Tier 2 and Tier 3 ISPs, as well as last-mile providers. ThousandEyes has 193 cloud vantage points globally in 58 countries for unrivaled performance data from local transit providers and last-mile ISPs.
Digital Experience Monitoring that Looks Ahead
We believe that digital experience monitoring (DEM) requires the right vantage points so you can measure and understand how DNS, CDN, hosting and third-party API provider components are performing. And these vantage points need to be representative of your customers and account for hybrid cloud environments as well. We’re thrilled to be expanding our cloud agent coverage within China so that global enterprises can better monitor and measure Internet delivery in these regions.