Cisco’s ThousandEyes can peer into SaaS performance

Cisco has broadened the scope of its ThousandEyes network-intelligence gathering software to let customers watch over their growing expanse of software-as-a-service applications.

In addition to its existing Internet Insights platform, ThousandEyes has a new program called Application Outages that promises to provide views into the availability of the SaaS applications employees are using.

Internet Insights gathers data from what Cisco says are tens of thousands of ThousandEyes Cloud Agents and Enterprise Agents spread across the internet and enterprise networks globally. ThousandEyes’ technology warns when a user’s experience is less than ideal and can pinpoint failures.

“Without needing to set up a single test, no deployment or instrumentation required, IT teams are empowered with both near real-time and historic views into the availability of more than 75 of the most important SaaS applications employees rely on,” wrote Conley Read, product line lead with ThousandEyes Collective Intelligence group in a blog about the news.

SaaS applications come in many forms from a variety of vendors such as AWS, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and others.

“Customers can quickly correlate user-specific issues to broader application issues to proactively alert their workforce that an app is unavailable, while also escalating the issue to the SaaS provider—often before the SaaS provider acknowledges the issue publicly,” Read stated.   

“And, by understanding application-provider availability over time, customers are equipped to make more informed vendor decisions and better manage providers.”

According to Read, in 2019, Internet Insights detected 20 network outages per day based on a 30-day average. By 2020, that same average had grown to 30 outages per day. Today, that number is more than 50.

Recently, Facebook went down for more than seven hours when a configuration change took down a critical part of their backbone network, leading to other issues including DNS service disruption. And Akamai’s DNS went down, affecting PlayStation Network, Delta, Costco, and UPS among many others. Other outages haven’t made the news cycle but continue to cost operations teams valuable time troubleshooting and can result in lost revenue for the businesses that rely on them, Read stated.

Cisco bought ThousandEyes in 2020 and has implemented the company’s cloud-based Internet Insights software package across its product portfolio.

Most recently Cisco added ThousandEyes agents to its WebEx collaboration platform. The agents are integrated into Webex data centers and provide bi-directional visibility between users’ locations and Webex services.

“With this extended visibility, IT teams can see every network node along the forward and reverse paths that have the potential to impact user connections with Webex services, giving them the insight to optimize performance and ensure exceptional user experiences,” Cisco stated.