ThousandEyes and onePK

In the new world of networking, you can program your network.  You can make it do whatever you want.  Even your business applications can program your network.   Have you heard this before?  If so, you aren’t alone.  Well, before you let business applications program the network, how about starting somewhere a little less frightening?  Here is a good use case for network programmability that I thought about during the ThousandEyes presentation while at Network Field Day 6.  It combines ThousandEyes Private Agents and Cisco’s onePK.

Have you ever used IP SLA to monitor an Internet connection?  If the upstream router goes down that is monitored with good ‘ol ping, a route is injected to take a different path.  Let’s go out on a limb and say, you are programming the router with IP SLA commands to use a backup path if your primary path is down.  Network people can program, see that?  As a network CLI programmer, you can even do conditional route advertisements, policy routing, and a whole lot more!  Now just imagine having a more complete view of network and application state and creating a better ‘if then’ statement than ‘if ping fails’ on one router, or ‘if a route is lost,’  ‘then make a change on one device.’ Envision taking data inputs from various data sources and making more intelligent routing (as one example) changes.

With more companies using Software as a Service (SaaS) applications such as salesforce.com that may be deemed business critical, it would be great to dynamically failover to another Internet connection, at the same site or a different site, based on the performance of these Internet applications.

Monitoring Business Critical Internet (Cloud/SaaS) Applications

To do this, first there needs to be a tool to monitor the end to end path between the user and the application, which happens to reside on the Internet in this case.  Most tools that are deployed are usually only looking at intra-company data flow for deep analysis.  ThousandEyes, a young and emerging startup who just received $5.5M in funding a few months ago, is going after the market to actually test the performance of SaaS based applications.  They are unique in that they are monitoring the end to end path from Corporate and branch sites to specific websites and SaaS apps that are critical to the business.

Think of them as providing IP SLA [monitoring metrics] on steroids specifically for business critical internet-enabled applications.    They are doing some pretty neat things by leveraging public BGP route servers and can even spot a carrier who may have route flapping going on.   Of course, they are also testing packet loss, latency, and all that good stuff too.

If you could configure ThousandEyes on an Internet Edge router or Firewall like you can IP SLA, it would be pretty cool and easy to inject a backup route if salesforce.com  performance was degraded.  But, you cannot.  However, here is where things get really cool.  As every new company talks about these days, ThousandEyes has fully open RESTful APIs to their platform.  This means all of stats you would see on their dashboard can be pulled down into an application to consume them and act on them.

Enter onePK

If this same application was using something like Cisco’s onePK, you can correlate the data from ThousandEyes, determine what action should be taken if certain traffic conditions occur, and then dynamically inject a new route to the devices needed to redirect traffic to a different Internet connection.  This would be a very lightweight application that can be loaded on a server (VM).   You could then call this your personal Network IP SLA server  or SaaS SLA server!  ThousandEyes could be onto something with the drive toward PaaS/SaaS applications, but when you really think about what can be done from real time and statistical data to create a feedback loop, things get really interesting.  This type integration between systems could be basic starting point for network programmability.

For those wondering how ThousandEyes deploys their solution, it is deployed as a VM or Linux package at each site that is accessing the Internet.  These are called Private Agents.   For example, if there was a corporate site and just 1 branch site each with their own Internet connection, you would deploy 2 private agents.  Each one costs $99/month which isn’t bad if you start small to fully test the benefit of the solution.

If any end users that are current customers of ThousandEyes want to explore onePK integration, please let me know.  I’d be more than happy to get involved somehow.  If you’re local in the NYC Metro area, even better.

Related links on ThousandEyes:

MONITOR PUBLIC SAAS PROVIDERS WITH THOUSANDEYES

The Vision Of A ThousandEyes

THOUSANDEYES: A BETTER CLOUD-BASED APPLICATION PERFORMANCE MONITORING SOLUTION

Thanks,
Jason

Twitter: @jedelman8

Disclaimer:  ThousandEyes was a sponsor of Networking Field Day 6. In addition to a presentation, ThousandEyes may have provided marketing material and some sweet swag. At no time did they ask for, nor were they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this post. The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone. For more information on Networking Field Day, or any other Field Day event, please visit http://techfieldday.com.