ThousandEyes has launched ThousandEyes Synthetics, an Internet-aware synthetic monitoring solution for the detection of modern application performance issues.

Addressing a significant application performance monitoring gap introduced by API-heavy and Internet-dependent application architectures, ThousandEyes Synthetics visually correlates application performance to underlying infrastructure and Internet delivery performance in a single, shareable dashboard for instant root cause identification and collaborative issue remediation. These new capabilities dramatically reduce business continuity risks, enable successful SaaS and cloud-hosted application rollouts, and give IT teams confidence in their ability to troubleshoot SaaS, cloud-based and browser-based application performance issues.

“Traditional synthetic monitoring solutions simply don’t cut it in today’s Internet-dependent, cloud-centric ecosystem. An app-centric view with no knowledge of the underlying dependencies leaves IT, Digital Ops and service delivery teams dead in the water while troubleshooting application performance issues,” said ThousandEyes vice president of product, Joe Vaccaro. “ThousandEyes Synthetics enables both SaaS app owners and IT teams to deliver and deploy with confidence knowing they will be able to quickly identify exactly what’s causing any issues in end-user digital experience regardless of where the issue lies, eliminating massive business continuity risks.”

Legacy synthetics were designed for traditional application development approaches and for applications that are hosted in on-premises data centres where the Internet and third-party services aren’t potential complicating factors for application performance. Modern applications, however, require an entirely new approach to synthetic monitoring due to the fact they are distributed, interact with multiple third-party services through APIs across multi-cloud environments, and are constantly changing thanks to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) models.

ThousandEyes Synthetics combines a new, programmable javascript-based approach with deep active monitoring that correlates application insights gathered through synthetic tests with HTTP, network metrics, network paths, Internet routing, and outage visibility, in a single view. This allows for:

• Comprehensive Insights: Gain actionable insights into application performance with proactive monitoring of commonly trafficked user paths and multi-step business transactions.
• Cloud and Internet RCA: Expedite the identification of cloud- and Internet-related root causes of application performance issues like ISPs, CDNs, IaaS, SaaS, and the Internet.
• User-centric measurements: Understand how applications are performing from user-relevant locations via pre-deployed monitoring agent locations around the world and new mobile network monitoring agents.

“Our research shows that tool sprawl is a significant challenge for enterprise IT teams, and the need to reference multiple disparate tools and datasets makes addressing application performance issues incredibly difficult and time consuming, which has obvious impacts on end-user experience, revenue and brand reputation,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, research director at EMA Research. “ThousandEyes’ approach to consolidate and correlate different views of all the different potential sources of application performance issues will be very compelling for teams looking for that singular view, so time can be spent on issue remediation versus issue isolation.”

ThousandEyes Synthetics is currently in limited release and will be generally available later this year.