ThousandEyes, a performance analytics company, claims it can provide visibility across the majority of the Internet with a new, crowdsourced feature called Internet Outage Detection.
Companies that rely on Internet service providers (ISPs) for their infrastructure, and network IT teams, would use this product to troubleshoot problems, mitigate issues, and plan for preventative measures, says Scott Cressman, director of product management for ThousandEyes.
What’s different is that ThousandEyes, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, focuses on shedding light into the networks that users don’t own but still rely on, Cressman says.
By using the data collected by its users, ThousandEyes’ Internet Outage Detection makes this data visually available to users and customers via graphs and charts. Network operations teams can rapidly detect outages that are relevant to their networks and environments.
Within the past few months, ThousandEyes claims the feature has detected a Hurricane Electric route leak affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), trans-Atlantic issues on the Level 3 network, and a Tata cable cut in Singapore affecting Dropbox, to name a few.
Another distinguishing feature of ThousandEyes’ Internet Outage Detection is that it provides usable data not only on Internet traffic, but on routers as well. And it allows users to observe multiple networks and environments, so providers can see if their customers are experiencing any outages.
“We take the data about where we see issues across the Internet and look for patterns that might affect more than just one network,” Cressman says. “If we see 36 affected tests in your environment, we see something that is going beyond just one network. Not just your set of tests, but across your customer’s set of tests too.”
It is no surprise that a large number of ThousandEyes’ customers are in the financial industry. If there is an outage with an organization that has a critical network, a network with private and time-sensitive data, that company is going to want to know how its customers are being affected by the outage, if at all, Cressman says.