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ThousandEyes launches cloud performance monitoring tools
ThousandEyes has launched cloud performance monitoring tools. The latest offering provides critical metrics for software running in multi-cloud environments.
ThousandEyes has introduced performance testing and monitoring for applications running on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. The latest offering can help companies decide where to run software and track its performance.
ThousandEyes launched this week its first application- and network-layer testing agents on the three primary cloud providers. The company has cloud agents in 55 data centers across the globe, including 15 facilities belonging to AWS, 15 owned by Google Cloud, and 25 held by Microsoft Azure. Also, ThousandEyes has agents in the data centers of colocation partners, such as Equinix and Cogent, in more than 150 cities.
"Most of the enterprises I talk to are still using just a single cloud provider, but some of them are using multiple regions from that provider," said Shamus McGillicuddy, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, based in Boulder, Colo. "This new offering will help with that, [and] as they add new providers to their cloud architectures, the value of this ThousandEyes enhancement will increase."
How ThousandEyes cloud performance monitoring works
Agents are applications deployed on a virtual machine or as a Linux software package or Docker container. Companies that take out an agent subscription through the ThousandEyes portal will be able to do performance testing on multiple application layers between workloads running on different cloud data centers.
Testable layers include HTTP, webpage loads, scripted transactions, FTP, Session Initiation Protocol and Real-time Transport Protocol. The agents can also do DNS tracing.
On the network side, the agents can trace the traffic path from one router to another and test for packet loss, latency and jitter. They also can test and monitor the performance of the Border Gateway Protocol that manages how switches route packets across the network.
The network metrics, along with all information gathered from the application layers, are displayed on the ThousandEyes user interface.
Before the latest release, a company would only be able to use ThousandEyes technology to do cloud performance monitoring between workloads on a private data center and an IaaS provider. With the new cloud agents, a company, for example, could also test and monitor connections between an e-commerce site running on the IaaS platform and a cloud-based ratings engine or payment processor, such as PayPal.
"If you have an application that spans multiple cloud regions or multiple cloud providers, you now have the ability to visualize performance problems across complex cloud architectures," McGillicuddy said.
Worldwide spending on cloud services, including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, will reach $160 billion this year, an increase of 23.2% over 2017, IDC predicts. By 2021, spending will total $277 billion.
ThousandEyes sells its technology by annual subscription, based on usage and initial deployments. Pricing typically starts at $25,000, said Alex Henthorn-Iwane, a vice president of product marketing at ThousandEyes.
