ThousandEyes interrogates apps as they flow through clouds

ThousandEyes has uncloaked, promising that its technology will give data center admins a better way to track performance and diagnose problems across varied IT infrastructures.

The company launched on Wednesday at GigaOm Structure in San Francisco with $5.5m in funding from Sequoia Capital, and announced its own brand of app monitoring technology.

ThousandEyes's agent-based technology works inside private data centers and across public clouds, and collects app-specific performance metrics for HTTP, DNS, TCP, IP, and BGP.

It uses agents distributed across the public clouds to let admins track the performance of an application from server to client and through all the steps along the way.

The company's tech is focused on "the topology and delivery of applications," explains ThousandEyes chief executive and co-founder Mohit Lad, who has a PhD from UCLA, where he worked in its Internet Research Lab alongside ThousandEyes CTO Ricardo Oliveira.

The company's agents are available as a virtual appliance or a Linux package, and they support environments based on Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Oracle, VMware, and Microsoft.

They can be used to troubleshoot issues within the data center and outside it. "It's also useful for cloud providers because you can now understand if your ISPs are messing up," Lad says.

Its "X-Layer" technology nets this information together to provide a view of the complete application and infrastructure environment as it moves from root server out to the client.

Because ThousandEyes covers all the steps between an app server and a client, it can help admins figure out whether the problems lies with them, their cloud provider, or with routing services closer to the user.

Live app performance dashboards can be shared by admins with colleagues, allowing teams to work together on identifying and fixing problems highlighted by ThousandEyes.

The technology uses a different approach to traditional app-centric application performance monitoring systems like Compuware, and network-based ones like Boundary or New Relic.

"We are not very useful if you want to understand where stuff is going wrong in your app stack," admits ThousandEyes chief executive Mohit Lad.

Rather than being knowledgeable about specific applications (Compuware) or profiling the internal network to a high degree of fidelity, ThousandEyes goes for a wider approach where it tries to tackle both. "There is a big change going on," Lad says. "You cannot instrument cloud apps."

The company's customers include Equinix and Evernote, among others. Pricing for the service is a flat fee from $99 per agent per month, and pricing is done according to frequency of testing for public clouds. ®