Introduction to Cisco Thousand Eyes

Cisco ThousandEyes offers these benefits:

• Fast pinpoint of performance changes caused by device faults, congestion, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, hijack, route leaks, Domain Name System (DNS) failures, and service provider outages.
• Provide visibility across any network segment, along with a depth of insight that drives accurate diagnosis through network visualization with network intelligence.
• Rapidly diagnose and find problems with real-time performance data, with highlights of important insights with historical comparisons.
• Gain intelligence from various Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) layers and vantage points.
• Communicate the outcome by using friendly and customizable reports.
• Embedded alerting system for automatic monitoring and integration with other platforms.
• Collaboration tools to share interactive sets of data with third parties.

These are the Cisco ThousandEyes capabilities:

• Cisco ThousandEyes delivers visibility into every network. Agent-to-Agent Tests allow network operations teams to quickly troubleshoot and pinpoint issues that are caused by performance degradation in the reverse path.
• Cisco ThousandEyes provides visibility into every network segment and enables organizations to calculate both forward and reverse paths quickly. You can pinpoint issues (locations and their direction), enabling faster and more accurate issue resolution and higher service levels.
• Cisco ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents integrates within Cisco SD-WAN routing platforms to enable hop-by-hop visibility into the network underlay, including exact path and performance metrics and the ability to measure and proactively monitor overlay and SaaS application performance.

 ThousandEyes agents perform a series of tests run from different types of agents. Data from this synthetic test is then collected, aggregated, and presented together with the context to understand applications and services delivery across the internet, through the enterprise, and to the endpoint.

Extracting data from Cisco ThousandEyes is easy with the extensive REST API. With the API, you can pull the historical or latest data from your Cisco ThousandEyes account to any database and visualize it on your dashboard application of choice. For example, you can use a Python script to fetch and insert the data into the time-series database InfluxDB and visualize the data via the analytics and monitoring solution Grafana.

The following are supported functions on the dashboard:

• Get historical data (custom time range) and pull new data (set your interval) from your ThousandEyes tests.
• A sample Dashboard-template and InfluxDBv2 are already pre-configured.
• Collected data is persistent, and it will remain untouched even after the containers restart.
• Supported tests are, for example, (Web) Page load, (Web) HTTP server, (Network) End-to-End metrics, (Network) Path visualization, and so on.

ThousandEyes Agents

Agents are key components of Cisco ThousandEyes architecture. Agents enable you to monitor the application traffic and ensure end-to-end user experience.

There are different vantage points through Cisco ThousandEyes agents that are distributed in internal and external networks. Multiple types of agents offer different levels of visibility and tests.

Here are the available agent types:

• Cloud agents
• Enterprise agents
• Endpoint agents

Cloud Agents and those that ThousandEyes installs and administers in strategic locations across the world.You can request ThousandEyes to install Cloud Agents at the specified location if necessary. At the time of writing, over 350 different places are available worldwide.

Another type of agent is so called Enterprise Agents. The enterprise is responsible for installing the agents and supplying compute and network resources in this form of deployment.

The key advantage of Enterprise Agents is that we may place it in a convenient location for you. Assume you wish to assess the experience of my employees who work in each branch. In that scenario, all you need to do is install the agent in that specific branch. Then you will be able to measure objects from the right angle. These are known as Internal Vantage Points.

With Cisco integration, you can deploy enterprise agents on Catalyst switches and Cisco SD-WAN Edge Routers. Enterprise customers like the ease with which the agent may be deployed in a specified area.

The third type of agent is the Endpoint Agent, which has grown in popularity in recent years due to worldwide pandemic outbreaks, which caused an increase in working from home.

The Endpoint agent's objective is to provide visibility into the end-user experience. You can run scheduled tests in which we proactively monitor and evaluate how specified critical websites are accessible from the workstation or laptop on which the Endpoint Agent is installed.

The Endpoint Agent gives visibility into the local network, configuration settings, and device performance.

ThousandEyes test Types

Once agents are deployed or selected next step is to select from the ThousandEyes tests available per your specific use case.

The test is the foundation of the ThousandEyes platform. You will run tests to monitor the services used by your customers and employees.

Tests are categorized by what kind of agent runs the test and by layers of operation.

 Routing and Network Layer

Routing-layer tests provide methods for collecting internet routing-related information—this category of tests measures network performance and the path between an agent and a target device.

1. 1. Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Test

   2. Network Layer Test

DNS Layer

This suite of tests is dedicated to Domain Name System performance.

1. 1. DNS Server Test

   2. DNS Trace Test

   3. DNSSEC Test

Web Layer

This set of tests touches on various Web technologies starting from the most basic measurement of web server availability up to performing precision transactions on a target.

1. 1. HTTP Server Test

   2. Page Load Test

   3. Transaction Test

   4. FTP Server Test

Voice Layer

Voice-layer tests evaluate whether a connection can be established (SIP) and test the exchange of packets after the connection is made (RTP).

1. 1. SIP Server Test

   2. RTP Stream Test

 ThousandEyes Usecases

There are three high-level use cases for the ThousandEyes regarding what kind of visibility it provides:

• Employee Digital Experience (EDX): Provides INSIDE OUT visibility, meaning that you monitor user experience from inside your organization to outside service providers.
• Customer Digital Experience (CDX): Provides OUTSIDE IN visibility, meaning that you monitor the availability and user experience of your in-house hosted application experience.
• WAN Experience: Subset of EDX, primarily used in cases of Cisco SD-WAN deployments, provides visibility of Underlay and Overlay.

 UseCase 1: Overlay - User Experience and Network 

The advantage gained by operating Cisco ThousandEyes on routers is activating vantage points across multiple paths. You can detect issues anywhere along the route, from branch and campus endpoints to applications.