CISCO THOUSANDEYES

Effective handling of today’s network challenges with ThousandEyes, DNA Center, Catalyst 9000 app-hosting, and Aironet sensor devices.

Published: 2022.11.01.

Effective Management of Network Challenges Today with ThousandEyes, DNA Center, Catalyst 9000 App-Hosting, and Aironet Sensor Devices

The pandemic has forced large companies to take steps that were previously unimaginable; masses moved to home office, and due to chip shortages and shipping difficulties, applications are migrating to the cloud at an even faster pace. While there are obvious advantages to this, we must not forget the drawbacks; internal network visibility has been lost, and troubleshooting has become much more difficult. For the first time, corporate operations are highly dependent on internet service providers, and there are frequent “blind spots” in the network connections for operations. In case of user complaints, the usual troubleshooting tools are unavailable, as only a portion of the components are “in-house,” but the operational responsibility has not been reduced. The cloud is the new data center, the internet is the new network, and the home is the new office.

ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes aims to provide a solution to this. In the Dashboard, we create tests that define critical applications, resources, and parameters – such as availability, response time, DNS, BGP monitoring, packet loss, etc. Higher-layer measurements typically include lower-layer measurements, for example, an HTTP test includes BGP route and path visualization. These tests are ultimately run by the cloud, endpoint, or enterprise agents that we select, and the measurement results can be tracked on the ThousandEyes Dashboard, but they can also be integrated into any system via the API.

The solution is proactive, vendor-independent, and easy to deploy.

There are three types of agents:

1. Cloud agent: Located in more than 200 data centers, Tier 1, 2, and 3 service providers, and cloud providers, managed by ThousandEyes.

2. Endpoint agent: Installed on users’ computers.

3. Enterprise agent: Can be installed in your own data center, VPC, or even on network devices. This allows monitoring of internal resources that are not accessible over the public internet.

In short, with ThousandEyes, visibility extends beyond corporate demarcation points, allowing previously hidden network relationships to be seen by network engineers. We gain accurate, reliable, and fast information from multiple independent perspectives on service availability and performance, BGP routes, and the video and audio quality of online conferences. In case of failure, we have proof of application-layer errors or service provider-side network slowdowns, which can be shared as snapshots with the stakeholders, speeding up troubleshooting.

Cisco DNA Center

The management platform for enterprise network devices is Cisco DNA Center. To understand its role, we need to define the concept of Intent-Based Networking – which, roughly translated, means “goal-based network operation,” implemented by Cisco through DNA (Digital Network Architecture). In brief, the essence of IBN is that we define the desired network operation at a high level, and the controller “translates” this into the network devices’ configuration.

For example, think of a QoS (Quality of Service) setting; practically, for each hardware platform, there are different configuration options and ASIC-level constraints, software limitations. In the IBN architecture, for QoS, we must define whether the application is business-critical or not, and with the help of DNA Center Application Policies – based on Cisco Validated Design Guides – it configures the devices, whether it’s a switch, router, or even a WLC.

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