Cisco ThousandEyes announces general availability for Cloud Insights on AWS

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Cisco ThousandEyes announces general availability for Cloud Insights on AWS banner

On 2nd December at AWS re:Invent 2024 ThousandEyes announced the general availability of a new solution called Cloud Insights. In many ways this can be seen as an extension of its existing Cloud and Internet network monitoring capabilities, but its implication for enterprises with mission critical applications running in the Cloud will be profoundly beneficial.

Why is this important? Since about 2018 I have been talking about the visibility gap that exists for IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams tasked with delivering assured end-to-end visibility for business applications in the Cloud. Terms like Full Stack Observability (FSO) and Observability into Cloud environments can be misleading. The reality is, that when you step through the door into a Hyperscalers network, you will find it very difficult to monitor the passage of data traversing the network.

Traditional network monitoring and management applications have relied heavily on being able to monitor the individual fixed IP addresses of routers, switches and other network equipment. Public Cloud Networks are highly virtualised. The data plane has been abstracted away from the control plane and IP addresses are created, assigned and discarded dynamically. Linking an IP address to a specific piece of network equipment is not much use in this environment.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Microsoft Azure (Azure) and Google Compute Platform (GCP) all provide Flow Logs that capture metadata about traffic entering, leaving, and traversing virtual networks. This is useful for monitoring such traffic, up to a point. However, the level of granular detail isn’t always as detailed as required, and it doesn’t provide correlation to the applications involved.

To make matters more complicated, the use of containers and micro-services architectures in general, automated load balancing and the widespread adoption of Kubernetes result in an extremely ephemeral environment with container instances being provisioned, loaded and taken down again rapidly.

In order to gain a greater level of observability into these micro-services traversing the public cloud network, DevOps teams can use tools like Terraform to embed monitoring instructions and policies into a CI/CD pipeline. But the whole process does require a great deal of thought and the pulling together of a number of tools.

Some larger digital organisations, such as Netflix, have built their own monitoring and management capabilities using a range of open-source tooling. Back in 2019 ThousandEyes decided it needed to develop its monolithic application, running in its own data centres, into a modern, micro-services-based application running entirely in the Cloud, on AWS to be precise. During the development phase their engineers discovered that they did not have the visibility into their network traffic that they experienced previously. Getting the level of granular information they needed from AWS was proving a little problematic. However, the acquisition of ThousandEyes by Cisco in 2020 facilitated much greater access to AWS, particularly as much of the physical switch and route infrastructure was Cisco based.

Roll forward to today and customers can now provide their AWS credentials to ThousandEyes, and the Cloud Insights service will map out their network topology. Then, it will monitor flows and correlate those flows to the underlying applications and services. At the moment the service is available on AWS, but work is on-going to provide the same capabilities for Azure and GCP.

Given ThousandEyes existing monitoring solutions and the potential synergies to be realised by collaborating with other Cisco companies like AppDynamics and Isovalent and the journey to achieving end-to-end visibility in a public cloud environment, on AWS at least for the moment, is now within companies’ grasp.

In my opinion, this is very much a case of why roll your own when you can use the Cloud Insights service.

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