A typical enterprise network consists of numerous individual segments that often extend beyond the data center. As a result, pinpointing the cause of traffic bottlenecks and other technical problems can be a rather tricky task.

San Francisco-based ThousandEyes Inc. is one of the several venture-backed startups working to address the challenge. Today, the provider launched a new version of its monitoring platform that expands upon the existing traffic analysis features with the ability to gain insight into the individual devices handling the flow of data in a company.

Network operations teams can now employ ThousandEyes to keep watch over their routers, switches, firewalls and network load balancers. The startup said its platform can monitor how well each piece of hardware performs, as well as the way the devices interact with one another. This visibility can be used to take troubleshooting efforts a step further than was possible with the software until now. 

After they’ve used ThousandEyes to trace a bottleneck to the part of the network experiencing issues, administrators can take advantage of the new device-level visibility to identify the specific device at fault. Doing so was previously possible only with the help of outside software. Removing the need to separately pull up the relevant network logs with a different product is a potentially major convenience that could reduce troubleshooting times. 

An added benefit is that there’s one less tool for administrators to set up and learn. Given the complexity of enterprise networks, that can also help reduce overhead in day-to-day operations.

Today’s update comes about a year after ThousandEyes introduced a similarly fine-grained monitoring capability for tracking employee devices. According to the company, administrators can see what workers are accessing company infrastructure from outside the office and troubleshoot connectivity issues.

ThousandEyes claims to be the first provider to offer such extensive visibility into network operations. That could prove to be a valuable point of distinction in the fiercely competition network monitoring market. ThousandEyes has already managed to win over some large customers such as Mastercard Inc., Lyft Inc. and pharmaceutical giant Roche AG.

Image: Pixabay