Processing...

ThousandEyes Helps SIDN Migrate to Anycast DNS

Posted by on April 19th, 2018
April 19th, 2018

When SIDN, one of the world’s largest top-level domain managers, decided to migrate one of their authoritative name servers from Unicast to Anycast to improve performance, they selected ThousandEyes as their network monitoring and intelligence partner. ThousandEyes was able to provide SIDN with the data they needed to understand latency and traffic routes from many different vantage points, so they could identify issues and improve performance — ensuring a successful migration.… Read More »

Understanding Internet Exchanges via the DE-CIX Outage

Posted by on April 13th, 2018
April 13th, 2018

Internet Exchanges (IX) play an important “efficiency” role in the practical matter of physically connecting the networks that comprise the Internet. IXs are facilities that provide space, power and connectivity to member networks—typically Internet Service Providers (ISPs), telecom, cable and mobile carriers, content providers, web enterprises and sophisticated enterprises such as large financial services companies. This infrastructure is used by these networks to arrange peerings exchange regional, national and/or international IP traffic. By being able to peer with many different networks in one facility, networks can cost-effectively gain lower-latency connections than if they had to reach those networks via multiple transit hops. The availability of multiple peerings also increases network and transit path resiliency. … Read More »

What can ISP pilot tests predict about the future of your SD-WAN?

Posted by on April 12th, 2018
April 12th, 2018

Okay, so where’s this coming from? I recently had a conversation with an unnamed analyst from an unnamed, large analyst firm whose name starts with a letter between E and J (haha gotcha!). We were discussing the move to SaaS, SD-WAN and Direct Internet Access from branch offices, and how variable behavior of Internet connectivity in various parts of the world is causing real problems with cloud adoption and WAN modernization. He was telling me that in a number of inquiries held with large enterprises, that consternation caused by unpredictable behavior is causing network teams to demand multi-month pilots with ISPs for office locations in Asia-Pacific and other regions.… Read More »

Monitoring Office 365

Posted by on April 4th, 2018
April 16th, 2018

Is my network ready for Microsoft Office 365? How do I monitor network performance and ensure a flawless user experience across my entire user base, regardless of whether they are on my network or out on the Internet? These are the questions plaguing many adopters of the Office 365 suite, which includes Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online. … Read More »

Modern Wide Area Network Monitoring: Migrating to DIA

Posted by on March 29th, 2018
March 29th, 2018

In my last post in this mini-series, I covered why so many customers we’re talking to are considering migrating away from MPLS and the journey to SD-WAN. In this follow-up post on wide area network monitoring, we’ll look at the growing pains associated with migrating to Direct Internet Access (DIA). Regardless of whether you choose to implement a more basic branch DIA architecture using per-site policy routing, or an SD-WAN, moving away from MPLS networking creates a major challenge and one which all of the customers I’ve been speaking to recently have been wrestling with.… Read More »

Modern Wide Area Network Monitoring: Migrating from MPLS

Posted by on March 21st, 2018
March 29th, 2018

Working at ThousandEyes I frequently talk to customers looking to move away from MPLS wide area networks to direct internet access (DIA), typically as part of a branch/edge router refresh and often incorporating cloud proxy and SD-WAN technologies. The success of these network transformations generally depends on uncovering issues related to a greater reliance on 3rd parties for application delivery early on, creating proof points with impartial data and enabling workflows to proactively manage such issues.… Read More »

Does AWS Direct Connect Guarantee Cloud Performance?

Posted by on March 13th, 2018
March 20th, 2018

On Friday, March 2nd we saw a severe outage across Amazon AWS’ US-East-1 region, located in Ashburn, VA. This outage impacted Amazon’s very own Alexa along with multiple apps and services hosted within the IaaS provider, including Slack, Twilio and Atlassian JIRA. Although the infrastructure recovered very quickly from what was a weather-related power outage, we saw prolonged and cascading impacts on many software applications and services running on AWS.… Read More »

Introducing Broadband ISP Cloud Agents

Posted by on March 7th, 2018
March 7th, 2018

The delivery of every website and web application relies on a set of dependencies that include Internet providers, DNS and, increasingly, CDNs and other 3rd party services. Failure or degraded performance of any of these services can dramatically impact application delivery. Proactive, continuous monitoring of network and service dependencies is critical to ensuring users of a website or Internet-facing application have a high-quality digital experience.… Read More »

Amazon AWS Outage a Lesson in Managing Cloud First Risks

Posted by on March 2nd, 2018
March 6th, 2018

On Friday, March 2nd, 2018, a power outage hit the AWS-East Region (Ashburn), affecting hundreds of critical enterprise services like Atlassian, Slack and Twilio. Significant corporate websites and Amazon’s own service offerings were impacted as well. ThousandEyes operates a global set of software agents performing Internet-aware network monitoring. We were able to catch this outage in the act, which rippled very quickly outward towards other services. Even customers relying on Amazon private connectivity service known as AWS Direct connect were affected.… Read More »

How GitHub Successfully Mitigated a DDoS Attack

Posted by on March 1st, 2018
March 5th, 2018

On Wednesday, February 28th, 2018 at 9:15am Pacific Standard Time, GitHub, the popular web-based hosting service for software development, was a victim of a powerful DDoS attack that impacted its global user base of 20M. It was one of the largest DDoS attacks, with attack traffic peaking at 1.3Tbps. Concerned users, some who were in the midst of a code check-in, took to Twitter to express their feelings while simultaneously looking for answers. Unfortunately for GitHub, their status page was also affected, adding a bit of anxiety to the equation.… Read More »