ThousandEyes Network Troubleshooting

Study Notes

Network Troubleshooting with ThousandEyes

In today's digital landscape, ensuring seamless delivery of web applications is crucial for businesses across various industries. One tool that has gained significant traction in helping organizations tackle complex networking issues is ThousandEyes. This platform provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed specifically for network performance monitoring, DNS monitoring, network visibility, and application performance monitoring. In this article, we will delve into the capabilities of ThousandEyes and its role in addressing common challenges faced by IT professionals when diagnosing and resolving network problems.

Network Performance Monitoring

ThousandEyes offers advanced features for tracking network performance metrics, such as latency, jitter, bandwidth utilization, and packet loss. By collecting data from multiple vantage points around the globe, it can identify bottlenecks or degradations in internet connectivity between any two locations across the public Internet. With real-time insights into network health, IT teams can quickly pinpoint where a network outage occurred and work towards restoring service.

Furthermore, ThousandEyes helps users visualize their end user experience, which is particularly important considering the growing reliance on cloud services like AWS and Azure, as well as SaaS offerings like Salesforce and Zoom. By providing visualizations of response times, error rates, and availability over time, administrators have better insight into how end-users interact with critical business systems.

DNS Monitoring

Domain Name System (DNS) plays a pivotal role in translating domain names into IP addresses. As a result, even minor adjustments in DNS configuration could lead to widespread disruptions if they go unnoticed. To address these concerns, ThousandEyes integrates DNS monitoring into its core functionality. It continuously checks domains worldwide, alerting users whenever there are unexpected changes or errors in DNS resolution.

By leveraging the power of ThousandEyes' DNS Monitoring solution, companies can proactively detect potential downtime risks caused by DNS misconfigurations before customers actually encounter them. For example, if a company moves a website off one server onto another using IP change alone while keeping the domain name intact, there may still be instances when visitors see the old site instead of the new one without proper DNS setup. However, with ThousandEyes DNS Monitoring, organizations can stay ahead of such incidents.

Network Visibility

Network visibility refers to the ability to view all traffic flowing through a particular portion of the network, including details such as source, destination, protocol, payload, QoS parameters, etc. Achieving complete network visibility is challenging due to factors like segmented networks, encrypted traffic, and passive versus active measurements. Despite these difficulties, having clear visibility into your network topology allows you to spot issues more easily and respond faster.

With ThousandEyes, network engineers gain unprecedented levels of visibility into their enterprise networks and third-party connections. The platform provides access to live activity streams, showing every transaction occurring across private links connecting offices and servers within minutes after installation. Moreover, by deploying agent probes strategically throughout the internal network, administrators can collect traffic statistics and analyze packets, offering granular insight into network operations.

Application Performance Monitoring

Application performance monitoring (APM) involves measuring application performance and identifying issues impacting responsiveness and reliability. Today, many aspects of modern life depend on software running smoothly. Even small glitches can cause substantial inconvenience to consumers and financial losses for providers. Therefore, it's essential for organizations to understand what drives degraded app experiences so they can fix issues promptly.

Through its synthetic transactions feature, ThousandEyes simulates real users navigating websites or performing actions inside mobile apps. This enables businesses to assess performance benchmarks against industry standards and observe trends over time. Additionally, combining ThousandEyes with other tools like AppOptics fosters holistic observability enabling DevOps teams to correlate code-level information with external dependencies.

Conclusion

The rise of digital transformation makes reliable and efficient network infrastructure vital for maintaining competitive advantage. Tools like ThousandEyes play a crucial role in empowering IT departments to proactively anticipate and prevent network problems before they turn into costly issues. Whether it's monitoring global network quality, constantly checking DNS configurations, improving network transparency, or examining application performance in detail, ThousandEyes offers comprehensive solutions tailored to meet diverse business needs.

Description

Explore the capabilities of ThousandEyes for network troubleshooting, including network performance monitoring, DNS monitoring, network visibility, and application performance monitoring. Learn how ThousandEyes helps IT professionals diagnose and resolve common networking challenges effectively.