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 achieve pace, scale, and suppleness. What the migration guides don’t point out is what you lose: the flexibility 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 solely. 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 tens of millions in unplanned downtime, bloated cloud payments, and compliance publicity they wrestle to clarify to their boards.
At Cisco ThousandEyes, we didn’t simply research this downside. We lived it. And the answer we constructed to repair it for ourselves turned the inspiration 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 unsuitable, the implications 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 a simple analysis was a two-month investigation — in the end tracing again to a delicate routing misconfiguration that was almost invisible with out the best tooling.
Two months. One routing error. That’s the true price of a cloud visibility hole.
Our clients had been telling us the identical story. The cloud had delivered on its promise of scale — and uncovered a essential blind spot no present device was purpose-built to unravel.
Constructing the Resolution by Turning into the Check
Slightly 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 straight with product builders from day one. Each characteristic was examined in our personal dwell manufacturing surroundings earlier than it was thought of prepared for purchasers. If it didn’t remedy an actual downside for us, at our scale and complexity, it wasn’t able to ship.
This created a decent suggestions loop between the folks experiencing the issue and the folks constructing the answer. It made Cloud Insights essentially higher. Our work targeted on 4 essential 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 had been beforehand invisible.
Cloud topology mapping: A dwell, constantly up to date map of our total AWS surroundings 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.
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 — chopping 1000’s of {dollars} per thirty days from our AWS invoice. At enterprise scale, these hidden price drivers erode cloud ROI and frustrate the CFOs who accepted 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 huge scale throughout a number of areas, and having this one-stop store for holistic visibility is extraordinarily beneficial. 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 clients.” — 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 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 a blind spot left.
Outcomes That Modified How We Function
The outcomes are measurable:
Decision time: months to hours — straight 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 in the present day.
The Visibility Crucial
Our north star hasn’t modified: ship the absolute best digital expertise for each consumer, in all places. Cloud Insights helped us fill a essential visibility hole, and the teachings we discovered constructing and working 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 possibly can see all the pieces, you possibly can repair something — and that modifications what it means to function within the cloud.
