Forwarder Requirements

The following requirements and performance criteria apply to the Enterprise Agents you enable for forwarding.

Supported Enterprise Agents

Forwarder enablement on the ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent is supported only for:

• ThousandEyes Virtual Appliances (TEVA) using the Open Virtualization Format (OVA). Machine sizes and capacity rates are:

  RAM	Cores	FPS (supports up to)	Approx PPS	Max Traffic Monitors
  32 GB	16	200,000	20,000	1,000
  8 GB	4	50,000	5,000	1,000

• CAF (Cisco Application Hosted Framework) agents. Device types and capacity rates are:

  Routers	FPS (supports up to)	Approx PPS	Max Traffic Monitors
  ISR1k, ISR4k, Cat8k, and ASR1k	10,000	1,000	3

Note that a packet per second (PPS) is estimated to equal around 10 flow records per second (FPS).

While you can select to "Enable" other devices as forwarders (see Enabling and Managing Forwarders), such as some ThousandEyes physical appliances (TEPA) or other CAF agents, we have not verified every possible hardware or software configuration that can be used. Therefore, we can only offer support to the above verified agent types.

To check if you already have a supported Enterprise Agent, see Finding an Existing Supported Agent. If you don’t already have a compatible Enterprise Agent, you can install one for Traffic Insights; see the Enterprise Agent Installing section for the relevant articles about installing an Enterprise Agent on a virtual appliance or via the CAF.

Capacity Rates

Forwarder capacity and other metrics are estimated for each supported Enterprise Agent type in the above tables. Estimations are based on the most powerful machine configuration and on records containing all recommended fields.

Note: Once you have set up Traffic Insights, you can check whether your forwarder is breaching capacity via the Dropped Events column at Traffic Insights > Settings > Forwarders. See View and Manage Your Forwarders for more information.

Deployment Approaches

The capacity rates above for TEVA and CAF agents naturally suggest two kinds of forwarder deployment approaches.

1. Because the TEVA appliance can handle much larger exporter numbers and flow rates, we recommend installing the forwarder on one or more centralized Enterprise Agents at central or regional data centers. In this scenario, you only configure one forwarder for your entire network or one forwarder per regional network.

2. For those using CAF, we recommend a more distributed approach, such as a forwarder on each local network. CAF users are likely to have Enterprise Agents already installed on these local networks, making enabling them as forwarders relatively straightforward.

Additionally, we recommend using the designated Enterprise Agent(s) only for Traffic Insights, rather than as an agent that also runs tests. We acknowledge, however, in the CAF scenario, that you may be repurposing Enterprise Agents that still run tests. In this case, we recommend reducing the number of tests run on those agents to less than 10 to optimize their flow rates.

Agent Restrictions

Some restrictions apply to the use of Enterprise Agents as forwarders:

• No clustering: You cannot enable Traffic Insights for an Enterprise Agent cluster. Any Enterprise Agent that has already been enabled for Traffic Insights cannot be added to a cluster. See Working with Enterprise Agent Clusters for more information.

• No shared Account Groups: You cannot enable Traffic Insights for an Enterprise Agent that is shared with another Account Group. Any Enterprise Agent that has already been enabled for Traffic Insights cannot be shared with another Account Group.

• Max Flows: Each ThousandEyes account group is capped at 500,000 FPS (around 50,000 PPS).

• CAF Agent Tests: We recommend running a max of 10 Network & App Synthetic tests when an agent is used simultaneously for synthetic tests and as a forwarder (see Deployment Approaches for more information).