In the last 10 years we’ve seen a radical change in the way applications are delivered in enterprise environments. Workstations and desktops have been replaced with mobile devices such as phones and tablets or thin clients that connect to centralized VDI servers. On premise bare metal servers have been virtualized and consolidated, and applications that used to be on the… Read More »
In this blog post, I’d like to focus on a specific piece of ThousandEyes technology: X-Layer. X-Layer is a connecting thread between different application delivery layers, enabling root cause analysis across seemingly disconnected data sets. For example… Read More »
In this article I’ll do a deep dive into some of the not-so-obvious capabilities of Deep Path Analysis, focusing on troubleshooting Path MTU and TCP MSS measurements. These two parameters are important in determining how application streams are split… Read More »
In this post I’ll cover in more detail the route monitoring capabilities of ThousandEyes, including our new visualization monitoring both private and public eBGP routes for our customers. … Read More »
Measuring network bandwidth is key to understanding network performance and performing capacity planning. Iperf, a traditional network testing tool, measures TCP throughput; but, this is not the same as available bandwidth (or capacity, for that matter). For instance, iperf results are highly dependent on the default TCP parameters of the kernel, among other caveats. But one of the main limitations… Read More »
At ThousandEyes we deal with huge volumes of data collected from our agents across the Internet. A large number of our tests are configured to target public facing web sites owned by our customers. The performance of each site depends heavily on the provider hosting the site and how well it is connected to the Internet, especially for sites with a global footprint of users. … Read More »
Alert Fatigue is a common problem in monitoring systems, and happens whenever there’s an excess of alerts being triggered that are mostly false positives, i.e. noise. Finding a good balance of false negatives and false positives is somewhat an art rather than a science. In this article I will talk about some techniques to mitigate alert fatigue.… Read More »
Over the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of discussions and content online that equate the performance of an application with speed, most notably from the web performance and WPO (web performance optimization) communities. The corollary of this trend is to equate end user experience with the time it takes for a web page to load, aka RUM or real-user monitoring, but performance is not speed. … Read More »
Iperf was originally developed by NLANR/DAST as a tool to measure maximum TCP and UDP bandwidth performance. In most cases the results reported by Iperf are close to the real available bandwidth, however the results of the test can’t always be taken at face value… Read More »
There’s a set of tools that all network engineers are familiar with, and have been around for years, almost as long as the Internet itself in some cases. Yes, I’m talking about tools like traceroute, mtr, iperf and ping. These tools have been the bread and butter of network troubleshooting and can be very useful for simple tasks such as… Read More »