Cloud Insights

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ThousandEyes Cloud Insights can increase monitoring coverage into your cloud native infrastructure inventory, topology, and traffic. With monitoring capabilities that augment Cloud and Enterprise Agent tests, ThousandEyes Cloud Insights offers end-to-end visibility for services and applications deployed in cloud native environments.

Why Cloud Insights?

While you can monitor services and applications deployed in the cloud using IP-based methods, you only have visibility up to the entrypoint of your cloud environment. Within the cloud environment, visibility can be limited, making it challenging to identify and troubleshoot issues. With ThousandEyes Cloud Insights, not only can you navigate and explore the assets deployed in your cloud environment, but you can also visualize your monitoring coverage of these assets and trigger test creation on demand. Additionally, traffic flow analysis enables the discovery of new assets and dependencies.

1. Cloud networks are highly virtualized.

Traditional IP-based network data gathering methods are less effective for monitoring in virtualized environments because physical network elements are managed by virtualization software services. Because cloud networks are highly virtualized, IP-based methods can only discover IP addresses for the AWS overlay network. These IP addresses are dynamic and cannot be easily triangulated to an AWS specific infrastructure element. For example, SNMP for on-premise networks provides network infrastructure metrics to measure the health of network related assets. However, the network infrastructure health is less relevant in AWS because physical network elements are managed by AWS as a service.

2. Cloud networks are highly dynamic.

Cloud networks are automated and configuration files are generated. Once appropriately configured, networks can auto scale, leading to new network or server instances being deployed automatically via auto scaling groups based on load. A manual configuration change can have unintended upstream impact to dependent services. When used alongside ThousandEyes Cloud and Enterprise Agents views, you can time-correlate these configuration changes with network availability and performance metrics.

3. Cloud networks span cross AWS accounts.

Using multiple AWS accounts is a best practice as it provides a natural billing boundary for costs, isolates resources for security, gives flexibility for individuals and teams. Cloud networks often need to span cross AWS accounts to connect instances together. Understanding and troubleshooting cross AWS account networking can become highly complex. Using your AWS account details, ThousandEyes Cloud Insights builds a network map of various services connecting together, which saves you time in understanding and maintaining a live view of your cloud network. This also helps you more rapidly troubleshoot connectivity failures.

How Can Cloud Insights Help?

Cloud Infrastructure Topology

The topology view gives you the ability to visualize cloud provider network infrastructure and quickly identify issues from a high level. Once you have identified an issue, zoom in to gather a better understanding on the performance issue impacting the network resource (e.g. packet loss, high 4xx/5xx error count, etc). For complex cloud provider setups that are divided into multiple projects or accounts, the Cloud Insights topology view shows how those accounts and their networks are connected.

Cloud Configuration Management

The events timeline gives you the ability to correlate network performance issues within the cloud environment with configuration changes. Events can include a cloud compute instance being terminated due to a failed health check, a security group policy change that happened before the service disruption, or a VPC/TGW/Routing change. With a proactive monitoring strategy, you can receive notifications when an event occurs resulting in network performance degradation for a given cloud environment resource, enabling you to take immediate action.

Traffic Flow Logs

The traffic flow logs provide additional context for your cloud-based application and environment traffic. You can visualize the traffic breakdown on a per application basis on a given VPC to better understand the network activity. Troubleshoot a request load increase on an AWS ALB endpoint by using the traffic flow logs to visualize the network activity (src, dst, bandwidth, etc). If a Cloud and Enterprise Agent test (destined towards a server in AWS) reports a network degradation event, such as high loss or high latency, the traffic layer can show both configuration changes and flow volume (in or out) for network assets that can be associated with the test.

Next Steps

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