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Latest and the Greatest in Cisco – An Introduction to ThousandEyes!

Latest and the Greatest in Cisco

An Introduction to ThousandEyes!

Cisco ThousandEyes platform aims to deliver real-time and historical visibility into the digital experience of applications running in an organization. These applications may be hosted in private data center or public data center as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Software as a Service (SaaS). 

Here we are not talking about just Network performance monitor (NPM) or Applications Performance monitor (APM), we are talking about digital experience of services which may include Global Internet, Application hosted in DC or Public cloud.

Fig 1.1- ThousandEyes 

Digital Experience visibility is more important today as a bad digital experience while accessing the application could result in revenue loss, brand damage or business loss itself. If we look around everything is getting evolve – now Internet is considered as new network; cloud as new data center; and SaaS as new application stack. All these new trends have their own corresponding challenges.

Cloud Is the New Data Center
Traditional troubleshooting tools that have been used in private data centers were not designed to effectively troubleshoot the public cloud environment. We have multiple DC instances in cloud and might expect some of the applications to be delivered to users from the nearest DC to the users’ physical location – to increase the digital experience which accessing the application. Enterprise don’t have insight into cloud – they just hope that everything will work when deployed.

Internet Is the New Network
With high adoption of public cloud, SaaS, IaaS and SD-WAN, enterprises heavily dependent on the Internet. One of the reasons is also the current hybrid environment due to current pandemic. Because this new network has no SLA and it’s constantly changing, it is very hard for enterprises to get the stable or undisruptive digital experience of a SaaS application

SaaS Is the New Application Stack
Traditional enterprises are finding it difficult to understand and improve the user’s digital experience for the applications not hosted in private data center such as SaaS or IaaS. APM tools that are available for decades are not able to identify issues and poor performance of an application hosted in cloud.

All these challenges are forcing enterprises to have a Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) – to have a view and control over the network that is not in their administrative domain i.e. Cloud DC, Internet, and SaaS. 

Cisco ThousandEyes DEM is powered by various techniques that includes Network Visibility, Endpoint, real-user monitoring (RUM), and Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM). This DEM could play a critical role in an organization’s digital transformation journey.