ThousandEyes quick review – Jan 2023

 

What is ThousandEyes? How can it help an IT pro do his/her job better and where can it be used?

TE is a monitoring platform, which is cloud based (SaaS). It has an extensive network of probes, in many service providers, and on TE/cisco’s own infrastructure. Organizations can also run probes in their own environment, onprem and in the cloud, to add additional points of monitoring. The customer probes are called ‘Enterprise Agents’ and can run on various platforms.

This service is somewhat similar to a large botnet, completely public and intentional, with the TE service running it and telling its many monitoring agents (bots) what to do, based on customer needs and config. It’s the good monitoring botnet, where you pay to join (subscription) and allocate resources to help monitor. Not like the bad kind of botnet who steals your resources and use them to do bad stuff.

Use cases for it include an online store that wants to be alerted if customers are experiencing long response times on its site, before the customers actually complain (proactive alerts). Or an enterprise that wants to know if their AWS instance is providing the contracted performance.

Another use case is a large service provider that has slow connection to one of its customers and need a way to ‘prove’ it to the last mile connection operator or to the customer, so they are not blamed for the bad performance.

In all of those test cases, TE will also show additional info about how the traffic gets from source to target and can potentially help identify bottle necks.

Traditional network management is limited to the perimeter of the enterprise network, it doesn’t have the ability to monitor cloud services or internet based performance. TE provides a tool to overcome that limitation.

Here are some screenshots from the interface:

Dashboard overview of all the configured tests

Linksys wireless router config for bridge mode

This is a follow up to my previous post WiFi Router Problems - How to Improve home wireless connection .

In it I will describe how to setup a Linksys E2500 wireless router to provide 5GHZ options to wifi routers that don't support this option (like the Verizon FiOS router (Actiontec MI424WR) .

Don't plug it right away to your existing router since it will probably conflict with it, instead connect it to the power and let is load.

After about 4-5 minutes, the router should be up and running and you should plug your computer's network cable to one of the wired ports. We are going to make changed on the wireless and therefor need to be connected with a network cable, otherwise our link would drop.

Once connected, you should get an IP address from the router and the default gateway would be the linksys, you can use ipconfig to figure out the default gateway address.

Open a web browser and point it to the address, a login prompt should appear and the default credentials would be username: admin with blank password.

Once logged in you want to do the following things:

1. Configure the E2500 to act as a wireless bridge (aka access point mode).


2. Configure an IP address to the router that does not conflict with your existing wifi router.
3. Disable the 2.4 GHZ service on the Linksys, we are going to use it for 5GHZ only.
4. Define the 5GHZ wireless parameters and security.
5. Define a password for the admin account.
6. Once those steps are completed, you can connect your E2500 to the provider router (FiOS) and start using the 5GHZ SSID.

Here are some relevant screen shots for the various steps, fields that are highlighted in yellow should be configured:

This image is for the ip address config and the Bridge mode.

You should probably name the 5 GHZ SSID with a name that has 5 at the end, so it's easy to identify.

Wireless security is very important, use WPA2 and set a long passphrase with letters and numbers.

Finally, don't forget to change you admin password, otherwise you can be hacked in no time.

thats it, save, plug to the provider router using a network cable and you should have the 5GHZ SSID available to you.