Months turned hours, days turned minutes, and cloud invoice surprises turned 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 acquire velocity, scale, and adaptability. What the migration guides don’t point out is what you lose: the power to see your individual 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 solely. Infrastructure spins up and disappears in seconds. The gear isn’t yours. And the instruments constructed for bodily knowledge facilities have been by no means designed for this world.
This is likely one of the defining operational challenges of the cloud period — and it’s costing enterprises thousands and thousands in unplanned downtime, bloated cloud payments, and compliance publicity they battle to clarify to their boards.
At Cisco ThousandEyes, we didn’t simply research this drawback. We lived it. And the answer we constructed to repair it for ourselves turned 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.
Virtually instantly, we misplaced the deep community visibility we had relied on for years. Mapping our cloud topology throughout greater than 100 AWS accounts turned almost inconceivable in actual time. And when one thing went improper, the results have 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 a simple prognosis became a two-month investigation — finally tracing again to a refined routing misconfiguration that was almost invisible with out the correct tooling.
Two months. One routing error. That’s the true price of a cloud visibility hole.
Our prospects have been telling us the identical story. The cloud had delivered on its promise of scale — and uncovered a vital blind spot no current instrument was purpose-built to resolve.
Constructing the Answer by Turning into the Take a look at
Relatively than ready for a completed product, we made a deliberate alternative: we might be buyer zero.
Our infrastructure group — the folks chargeable for conserving ThousandEyes working — partnered immediately with product builders from day one. Each characteristic was examined in our personal reside manufacturing setting earlier than it was thought of prepared for patrons. If it didn’t remedy 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 challenge that when took two months now resolves in hours — as a result of Cloud Insights surfaces the site visitors flows and routing anomalies that have been beforehand invisible.
- Cloud topology mapping: A reside, repeatedly up to date map of our total AWS setting means compliance and safety questions that when took days now take minutes.
- Change correlation: Once we adopted AWS International 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.
- Value management: We recognized routing inefficiencies between AWS accounts and traced a major spike in outbound prices to our construct setting’s interactions with GitHub — chopping 1000’s of {dollars} per 30 days from our AWS invoice. At enterprise scale, these hidden price drivers erode cloud ROI and frustrate the CFOs who accredited the migration.
The Commonplace 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.
“We have now large scale throughout a number of places, and having this one-stop store for holistic visibility is extraordinarily helpful. Internally validating Cloud Insights in our personal setting first actually gave us a leg up in constructing the arrogance 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 affords: end-to-end visibility from the consumer’s system, throughout the web, by means of each layer of cloud infrastructure, to the appliance. 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 lowering 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 as we speak.
The Visibility Crucial
Our north star hasn’t modified: ship the very best digital expertise for each consumer, in every single place. Cloud Insights helped us fill a vital visibility hole, and the teachings we realized constructing and working it proceed to form how we take into consideration cloud operations.
The journey wasn’t all the time clean, 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 every part, you’ll be able to repair something — and that modifications what it means to function within the cloud.
