A somewhat different bird's-eye view can help you to navigate and manage multiple networks. In the past, managed IT pros like me would need to create and print out elaborate network topography maps to help plan for network additions and changes. Now there are many software programs available that can create these maps automatically by scanning the local network.
SingleHop Gains Visibility From ThousandEyes
But sometimes, we want a real-time view of the network's performance -- instead of a bird's eye view of a static map. With that goal in mind, SingleHop, a global provider of on-demand hosted private clouds and managed cloud services, has embraced ThousandEyes -- a tool that provides insights into real-time reachability, latency and network performance metrics, as well as border gateway protocol (BGP) information for each path providing connectivity to SingleHop data centers.
With this information and rich visualizations, SingleHop engineers can quickly diagnose anomalies and reroute traffic as needed to ensure maximum uptime and customer experience. According to the company’s self-monitoring Bill of Rights SLA, they promise 100 percent uptime, so this insight is greatly needed in order to prevent problems -- or at least rapidly discover and mitigate them.
According to a SingleHop blog, ThousandEyes allows the company to:
"proactively monitor network performance from various points all over the world to SingleHop data centers, both from an ingress and egress point of view. Besides watching for the common measurements such as RTT, latency and jitter, specific network path and BGP activity is also regularly monitored as a means to provide detail rich reports in the event of an anomaly. Armed with this information, the Network Engineering staff is able to mitigate the event with much better precision and speed."
ThousandEyes Network Monitoring: Customer Adoption
ThousandEyes has been gaining momentum worldwide. The company's booking grew 100 percent in 2016 vs. 2015 across both domestic and international markets. Moreover, ThousandEyes won 18 Fortune 500 customers, and now counts five of the top five SaaS companies and four of the top six US Banks as customers, the company claims.
In some ways, it sounds like today' digital corn maze -- spanning multiple data centers and networks -- isn't quite as complex with ThousandEyes on the scene.
Additional insights from Joe Panettieri.