ThousandEyes Focuses on Cloud Application Performance

When it comes to moving applications to the cloud, IT organizations quickly become uncomfortable because of a perceived lack of control over the environment.

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To help IT organizations regain that sense of control, ThousandEyes today unveiled an approach to managing cloud applications that leverages agents and analytics tools that get deployed as a virtual appliance that specifically identifies the source of any cloud application problem.

According to ThousandEyes CEO Mohit Lad, the challenge IT organizations face in the cloud is that much of the underlying infrastructure lies outside the four walls of any data center they directly control.

Lad says the company’s namesake cloud application performance management tool makes it possible for IT organizations to run synthetic tests that identify performance issues long before they actually deploy an application on a particular cloud computing platform.

Based on the Cyclops network auditing technology developed by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), ThousandEyes also includes a set of collaboration tools designed to make it easier for IT professionals with different types of skills sets to communicate. That feature, says Lad, should substantially reduce the amount of time to remediation when working across multiple IT organizations.

Figuring out what causes a particular problem inside the enterprise has never been easy. There is a tendency to not want to admit any culpability, which usually winds up wasting a lot of time as IT organizations engage in a never-ending series of “blame games.” Cloud computing makes the challenges associated with determining the source of a problem only that much more challenging because it usually requires multiple IT organizations to cooperate.

Lad says that he thinks it’s going to be in the best interest of cloud application service providers to deploy ThousandEyes on the behalf of customers to reduce support calls. More often than not, the source of the problem isn’t with the cloud service provider, but rather some part of the extended enterprise that is being used to access the cloud application.

Wherever the problem lies, the sooner it gets resolved the better it is for all concerned, especially if that can occur before the cloud application ever gets deployed.