Scott Adams wrote a blog post once about career advice and whether is was better to be excellent at one thing or good at several things. Basically, being the best at something is fairly hard. There’s always going to be someone smarter or faster than you doing it just a bit better. Many times it’s just as good to be very good at what you do. The magic comes when you take two or three things that are very good and combine them in a way that no one has seen before to make something amazing. The kind of thing that makes people gaze in wonder then immediately start figuring out how to use your thing to be great.

During Networking Field Day 6, ThousandEyes showed the delegates something very similar to what Scott Adams was talking about. ThousandEyes uses tools like Traceroute, Ping, and BGP data aggregation to collect data. These tools aren’t overly special in and of themselves. Ping and Traceroute are built into almost every networking stack. BGP looking glass servers and data analysis have been available publicly for a while and can be leveraged in a tool like BGPMon. All very good tools. What ThousandEyes did was combine them in a way to make them better.

ThousandEyes can show data all along the path of a packet. I can see response times and hop-by-hop trajectory. I can see my data leave one autonomous system (AS) and land in another. Want to know what upstream providers your ISP is using? ThousandEyes can tell you that. All that data can be collected in a cloud dashboard. You can keep tabs on it to know if you service level agreements (SLAs) are being met. Or, you could think outside the box and do something that I found very impressive.

Let’s say you are a popular website that angered someone. Maybe you published an unflattering article. Maybe you cut off a user doing something they should have. Maybe someone out there just has a grudge. With the nuclear options available to most “hackers” today, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack seems to be a popular choice. So popular that DDoS mitigation services have sprung up to shoulder the load. The basic idea is that when you determine that you’re being slammed with gigabits of traffic, you just swing the DNS for your website to a service that starts scrubbing away attack traffic and steering legitimate traffic to your site. In theory it should prevent the attackers from taking you offline. But how can you prove it’s working?

ThousandEyes can do just that. In the above video, they show what happened when Bank of America (BoA) was recently knocked offline by a huge DDoS attack. The information showed two of the three DDoS mitigation services were engaged. The third changeover didn’t happen. All that traffic was still being dumped on BoA’s servers. Those BoA boxes couldn’t keep up with what they were seeing, so even the legitimate traffic that was being forwarded on by the mitigation scrubbers got lost in the noise. Now, if ThousandEyes can tell you which mitigation provider failed to engage then that’s a powerful tool to have on your side when you go back to them and tell them to get their act together. And that’s just one example.

I hate calling ISPs to fix circuits because it never seems to be their fault. No matter what I do or who I talk to it never seems to be anything inside the provider network. Instead, it’s up to me to fiddle with knobs and buttons to find the right combination of settings to make my problem go away, especially if it’s packet loss. Now, imagine if you had something like ThousandEyes on your side. Not only could you see the path that your packets are taking through your ISP, you can check latency and see routing loops and suboptimal paths. And, you can take a screenshot of it to forward to the escalation tech during those uncomfortable phone arguments about where the problem lies. No fuss, no muss. Just the information you need to make your case and get the problem fixed.

If you’d like to learn more about ThousandEyes and their monitoring solutions, check out their website at http://www.thousandeyes.com. You can also follow them on Twitter as @ThousandEyes.

Tom’s Take

Vision is a funny thing. Some have it. Some don’t. Having vision can mean many things. It can be someone who assembles tools in a novel way to solve a problem. It can be the ability to collect data and “see” what’s going on in a network path. It can also mean being able to take that approach and use it in a non-obvious way to provide a critical service to application providers that they’ve never had before. Or, as we later found out at Networking Field Day 6 during a presentation with Solarwinds, it can mean having the sense to realize when someone is doing something right, as Joel Dolisy said when asked about ThousandEyes, “Oh, we’ve got our eye on them.” That’s a lot of vision. A ThousandEyes worth.

Special thanks to Ivan Pepelnjak (@IOSHints) for giving me some ideas on this review.

Networking Field Day Disclaimer

While I was not an official delegate at Networking Field Day 6, I did participate in the presentations and discussions. ThousandEyes was a sponsor of Networking Field Day 6. In addition to hosting a presentation in their offices, they provided snacks and drink for the delegates. They also provided a gift bag with a vacuum water bottle, luggage tag, T-shirt, and stickers (which I somehow managed to misplace). At no time did they ask for any consideration in the writing of this review, nor were they offered any. Independence means no restrictions.  The analysis and conclusions contained in this post are mine and mine alone.