Release Notes: 2018-02-14

Welcome to tonight's release, on the eve of Valentine's Day!

We hope you'll love the latest couple of ThousandEyes blog posts. Senior Solutions Engineer Nitin Nayar describes monitoring of cloud-based proxy servers with ThousandEyes, and shows how to troubleshoot an actual performance degradation event in his article entitled Monitoring Zscaler Web Secure Gateways.

Our Senior Product Marketing Manager, Archana Kesavan has a post for you Cisco lovers. Roses are red; Cisco's logo is Pantone 299C blue. Run a ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent in your ASR or ISR, and get a great View (of Network Performance Monitoring for Cisco Hybrid WANs)!

And now the details of our release...

Cloud Agents

A few great new additions to our Cloud Agent family, plus a change to Cloud Agent provider info.

New broadband provider Cloud Agents

We've introduced the first group of Cloud Agents connected exclusively to networks of US consumer broadband providers. Each of these of 12 Cloud Agents will provide visibility into a network belonging to the CenturyLink, Comcast or Cox networks. Each Cloud Agent will be single-homed--connected to only the one provider, rather than using the multi-homed model we've used for most Cloud Agents. Single-homing guarantees that customers' tests use only the desired provider.

We have added the provider name to the name of the Cloud Agent for easy identification. In future releases, we will transition all single-homed Cloud Agents to this nomenclature of "location-provider" and make additional improvements in the user interface. Note that in some contexts of the user interface, a provider may be represented by multiple names due to acquisitions and mergers, e.g. CenturyLink may be CenturyLink, Qwest, Level 3, etc...

This first group of new Cloud Agents are located in the following cities:

• Ashburn, VA

• Chicago, IL

• Dallas, TX

• San Jose CA

• Seattle, WA

We will be adding more Agents in additional broadband provider networks and locations over the next few weeks.

Cloud Agent networks displayed in the user interface

In addition to the aforementioned new Cloud Agents, we are changing the heuristic we employ for populating the Provider column of the Cloud Agent page listing (and Agent selector). Until now, we have displayed one or more possible providers for multi-homed Cloud Agents. As of tonight's release, we will display one provider for single-homed Agents or multi-homed Agents whose test traffic exits predominantly through one provider (in the heuristic, "predominantly" corresponds roughly to 90%). We will show no provider for multi-homed Agents which have test traffic using routes that are not predominantly through one provider.

Virtual Appliance diagnostic for NTP

Time synchronization is important for full and proper function of Enterprise Agents. In most cases, Agents should be configured to obtain time via the Network Time Protocol. The Virtual Appliance now includes a check for NTP functionality in its Diagnostics:

A warning will be shown when some of the NTP servers configured do not provide an NTP response. An error will be shown when all configured servers do not provide an NTP response.

New Transaction test Alert metrics

We've added a number of new metrics for Transaction test Alert Rules:

• Completion: Completion percentage (number of steps completed/number of steps * 100)

• Any Step: Duration of any step

• Step #: Duration to finish loading the step with the specified number

• Any Page: Duration to finish loading any page

• Page #: Duration to finish loading the step with the specified number

Changing email senders of Alerts and Shares

In a future release, when customers receive emails generated by Alerts or by Snapshot Sharing, the From: email address will no longer be "[e-mail]". We will be changing the From: email address to "[e-mail]" and "[e-mail]". Customers who employ email filtering that uses "[e-mail]" should prepare for the change.

Minor features and bug fixes

• Simplified the user interface for selecting BGP Monitors. When an Account Group has no Private BGP Monitors, checking the Collect BGP data box displays the text "All public BGP monitors will be included".

• Fixed an issue with Reports widgets that could prevent filtering by test and test label at the same time.

• Fixed an issue with the Agents selector that prevented use of both labels and the Any | Enabled | Selected filters

• Displaying the Dashboard will now correctly prevent session timeout.

• Endpoint Agent Shared Events now correctly display the Share button.

• Increased the time that single sign-on metadata is cached if ThousandEyes cannot contact the specified SSO provider.

Reduced support hours for February 19

February 19th in the US is a holiday in the US. We will be providing support via email only, from 8 AM to 11 PM US Pacific Time (11 AM to 2 AM 2/20 in US Eastern Time, 4 PM to 7 AM 2/20 GMT). Live chat support will return after 11 PM PST.

Questions and comments

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