Cloud Insights

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

Cloud Insights is available as an optional feature you can add on to your existing ThousandEyes subscription. To set up a free trial, see Cloud Insights Trial.

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 entry point 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. Additionally, traffic flow analysis enables the discovery of new assets and dependencies, and the traffic patterns between assets (currently available for AWS environments only).

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 cloud overlay network. These IP addresses are dynamic and cannot be easily triangulated to a cloud-specific infrastructure element. For example, SNMP for on-premises networks provides network infrastructure metrics to measure the health of network related assets. However, the network infrastructure health is less relevant in a cloud environment because the cloud-based network elements are managed by the cloud 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 Network & App Synthetics views, you can time-correlate these configuration changes with network availability and performance metrics.

3. Cloud networks span across cloud accounts/subscriptions.

Using multiple cloud accounts or subscriptions is a best practice as it provides a natural billing boundary for costs, isolates resources for security, and gives flexibility for individuals and teams. Cloud networks often need to span across accounts/subscriptions to connect instances together. Understanding and troubleshooting cross account/subscription networking can become highly complex. Using your cloud account/subscription 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/subscriptions, the Cloud Insights topology view shows how those accounts/subscriptions 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 and operational 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/VNET/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. To learn more about the events timeline, see Events Tab.

Flow Logs

Flow logs, currently available for AWS environments only, 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 virtual network to better understand the network activity. Troubleshoot a request load increase on a load balancer endpoint by using the traffic flow logs to visualize the network activity (source, destination, throughput, etc). If a Network & App Syntehtics test (destined towards a server in your cloud environment) reports a network degradation event, such as high loss or high latency, the traffic timeline can show both configuration changes and flow volume (in or out) for network assets that can be associated with the test. See Views Screen for Flow Log Analysis for more information.

Cloud Insights Trial

You can request a free trial of Cloud Insights directly within the ThousandEyes portal by navigating to Cloud Insights from the left-hand menu. Click Request Trial to activate your free trial. You will receive a confirmation email when you start the 30-day trial period. While a free trial can only be requested once, you can talk to the account team to discuss additional options.

Next Steps

PreviousCisco Real SpeedNextIntegrations

Last updated