Navigating the Digital Superhighway: Why ThousandEyes is Your Modern Network's GPS - by James Lagan
- jlagan74
- Oct 26
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 29
Cars have always been central to my life. To the point in fact where I often find myself making automotive analogies. For most of my life I have restored and wrenched on air-cooled Volkswagens and during that time I have collected boxes and boxes of old parts. One part caught my eye the other day, the speedometer from a 1969 Volkswagen Type-1. It’s a simple gauge which offered just the basics: speed, a low oil light, and a faulty generator indicator. In 1969, that gauge and a windshield was all the visibility Volkswagen provided a driver. Of course, in 1969 travel was probably a lot simpler. Shorter distances, fewer highways, less traffic. But today? Our roads are a complex web of higher speeds, longer distances, endless construction, and unprecedented traffic. Even construction to mitigate long-term traffic creates huge traffic jams in the near-term.
But Volkswagen, and car manufacturers in general, have kept pace with the all these changes which create headaches for us on our commutes. The new Volkswagen Golf, the modern-day successor to the old Type 1, reflects this new reality. Equipped with GPS, Waze, collision avoidance, and a myriad of sensors, they transform how we navigate.
This dramatic shift in our roadways mirrors our digital landscape. Yesterday's networks were like those quiet 1969 roads. Today, they're bustling, global superhighways connecting cloud applications, remote workforces, and countless devices across infrastructure we often don't even own. These new digital obstacles, from internet outages to SaaS performance issues, demand a level of visibility far beyond traditional tools.
In short, you can’t protect from what you can’t see.
Just as modern automotive technology provides an unparalleled view of the physical road ahead, ThousandEyes delivers that same critical insight for your digital infrastructure. It's your network's comprehensive dashboard, offering a clear, real-time picture of every connected experience.
Seeing Every Mile of the Journey with ThousandEyes Agents:
Cloud Agents: Think of these as satellite navigation for the internet itself. They provide "outside-in visibility" from global vantage points, showing you how internet-facing applications and services perform from anywhere in the world.
Enterprise Agents: These are like the advanced diagnostics built into your own vehicle and private road network. Deployed within your data centers, branches, and cloud VPCs, they offer "inside-out visibility," monitoring your owned infrastructure and critical network paths, including overlay and underlay for SD-WAN deployments.
Endpoint Agents: These are your car's personal driver assistance systems, extending "direct end-user visibility" right to your employees' laptops, desktops, and even Wi-Fi 7 access points. Mobile Endpoint Agents further extend this to Android devices, ensuring mobile workers have a smooth journey.
Advanced Insights for a Clearer Path:
Beyond agents, ThousandEyes offers powerful insights:
Internet Insights: Like a super-charged down detector, easily access global alerts and real-time insights into the SaaS applications and provider networks your business relies on. Internet Insights alerts you to major internet outages and traffic disruptions before they impact your business.
Cloud Insights: Imagine a detailed blueprint of every cloud infrastructure you use, showing service dependencies and traffic flows. This helps you understand how public cloud resources are impacting your digital experiences.
Traffic Insights: For your owned networks, this combines flow data (like NetFlow) with synthetic tests, giving you a holistic view of usage and performance, akin to a detailed traffic analysis for your private road system.
WAN Insights: Gain proactive, real-time visibility into your SDWAN health and performance, with predictive insights that alert you to potential connectivity issues and network degradations—so you can keep your business running smoothly and ahead of disruptions.
Best of all, getting started with ThousandEyes is easier than most think. Many customers I speak to have some number of existing entitlements available to them in their Smart Accounts and don't realize. And even if there are only very few, that can be enough to test with. Even if there are no available entitlements, ThousandEyes offers free trial licensing to test with. Plus, it's easy to test a ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent on existing Cisco infrastructure (C9K/C8K/ISR/ASR/Nexus) or on many hypervisors. And if none of these are an option, Enterprise Agents can be tested readily on Raspberry Pi 4 or 5s.
ThousandEyes ensures you're never driving blind on the digital superhighway, keeping your operations smooth and your users connected, no matter how complex the route becomes.
Click below to learn more about ThousandEyes.
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