Months grew to become hours, days grew to become minutes, and cloud invoice surprises grew to become a factor of the previous — right here’s how ThousandEyes solved it for itself as Buyer Zero earlier than fixing it for you.
The Visibility Disaster No One Warned You About
When enterprises transfer to the cloud, they achieve pace, scale, and adaptability. What the migration guides don’t point out is what you lose: the power to see your personal community.
For many years, visibility was a given. You owned the {hardware}, traced the cables, and knew precisely the place an issue lived. The cloud modified that fully. Infrastructure spins up and disappears in seconds. The gear isn’t yours. And the instruments constructed for bodily information facilities had been by no means designed for this world.
This is among the defining operational challenges of the cloud period — and it’s costing enterprises hundreds of thousands in unplanned downtime, bloated cloud payments, and compliance publicity they wrestle to elucidate to their boards.
At Cisco ThousandEyes, we didn’t simply examine this drawback. We lived it. And the answer we constructed to repair it for ourselves grew to become the muse for Cloud Insights.
When We Misplaced Sight of Our Personal Community
In 2019, we migrated our operations to AWS. The enterprise case was clear. The operational actuality was humbling.
Nearly instantly, we misplaced the deep community visibility we had relied on for years. Mapping our cloud topology throughout greater than 100 AWS accounts grew to become practically unimaginable in actual time. And when one thing went fallacious, the results had been extreme.
One instance stands out. A buyer in Azure was experiencing intermittent connectivity points reaching our platform in AWS. What ought to have been an easy analysis become a two-month investigation — in the end tracing again to a delicate routing misconfiguration that was practically invisible with out the fitting tooling.
Two months. One routing error. That’s the true value of a cloud visibility hole.
Our prospects had been telling us the identical story. The cloud had delivered on its promise of scale — and uncovered a vital blind spot no current device was purpose-built to resolve.
Constructing the Resolution by Changing into the Check
Relatively than ready for a completed product, we made a deliberate selection: we’d be buyer zero.
Our infrastructure crew — the folks answerable for holding ThousandEyes operating — partnered immediately with product builders from day one. Each function was examined in our personal dwell manufacturing surroundings earlier than it was thought of prepared for purchasers. If it didn’t resolve an actual drawback for us, at our scale and complexity, it wasn’t able to ship.
This created a good suggestions loop between the folks experiencing the issue and the folks constructing the answer. It made Cloud Insights basically higher. Our work targeted on 4 vital areas:
- Community site visitors visibility: The Azure-to-AWS subject that after took two months now resolves in hours — as a result of Cloud Insights surfaces the site visitors flows and routing anomalies that had been beforehand invisible.
- Cloud topology mapping: A dwell, constantly up to date map of our whole AWS surroundings means compliance and safety questions that after took days now take minutes.
- Change correlation: After we adopted AWS World Accelerator, Cloud Insights allow us to correlate the precise second of the infrastructure change to measured efficiency enhancements — giving us clear, defensible proof our investments delivered worth.
- Price management: We recognized routing inefficiencies between AWS accounts and traced a big spike in outbound prices to our construct surroundings’s interactions with GitHub — reducing 1000’s of {dollars} monthly from our AWS invoice. At enterprise scale, these hidden value drivers erode cloud ROI and frustrate the CFOs who accepted the migration.
The Normal We Maintain Ourselves To
At Cisco ThousandEyes, we use our personal merchandise first — at full scale, in manufacturing — earlier than we ask anybody else to belief them.
“Now we have huge scale throughout a number of areas, and having this one-stop store for holistic visibility is extraordinarily useful. Internally validating Cloud Insights in our personal surroundings first actually gave us a leg up in constructing the boldness that we will drive the identical highly effective outcomes for our prospects.” — Murtaza Physician, VP, Cisco ThousandEyes Engineering
What makes Cloud Insights distinctively Cisco is what it connects to. Mixed with Cloud and Endpoint Brokers, it delivers one thing no different vendor gives: end-to-end visibility from the person’s machine, throughout the web, by each layer of cloud infrastructure, to the applying. That full-stack view closes the ultimate hole — as a result of there isn’t any blind spot left.
Outcomes That Modified How We Function
The outcomes are measurable:
- Decision time: months to hours — immediately decreasing the danger of extended buyer influence
- Compliance readiness: days to minutes — throughout 100+ AWS accounts, with out cross-team escalation
- Cloud prices: proactive, not reactive — stopping invoice surprises earlier than they attain the CFO
These aren’t aspirational claims. They’re operational realities ThousandEyes runs on in the present day.
The Visibility Crucial
Our north star hasn’t modified: ship the very best digital expertise for each person, in all places. Cloud Insights helped us fill a vital visibility hole, and the teachings we discovered constructing and operating it proceed to form how we take into consideration cloud operations.
The journey wasn’t at all times easy, however each late-night troubleshooting session taught us one thing that made the product higher. As a result of when you’ll be able to see the whole lot, you’ll be able to repair something — and that adjustments what it means to function within the cloud.