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In Cisco IT we have now loads of apply bringing acquired firms into the fold. We’ve added fourteen from January 2020 via August 2021 alone. We’re liable for connecting the brand new workplaces to our community and delivering shared companies like Cisco Webex, Workplace 365, and Salesforce.
When Cisco acquired Acacia Communications in March 2021, we would have liked to convey their world workplaces and contract producers onto our community. Earlier than changing Acacia’s SD-WAN with our personal enterprise spine we had to ensure the change wouldn’t have an effect on the person expertise in Acacia’s workplaces.
For earlier acquisitions, we used Cisco ThousandEyes to measure the person expertise from every location to Cisco companies like Webex. ThousandEyes is a part of our Full-Stack Observability (FSO) suite—together with Cisco AppDynamics to observe the appliance expertise and Cisco Intersight to troubleshoot Cisco UCS rack servers. Our plan: Use ThousandEyes to measure latency, packet loss, and accessible bandwidth between Acacia places and cloud companies to determine a benchmark. Then evaluate these outcomes in opposition to the identical outcomes for close by Cisco places.
The twist—we didn’t have entry to Acacia’s routers
Ordinarily we measure person expertise at Cisco and newly acquired firms by putting in ThousandEyes on routers and endpoints. However on this case, we couldn’t get community entry to put in ThousandEyes as a result of Acacia was in the course of a brand new product launch. We wanted one other approach to set up the agent.
Our answer? Set up ThousandEyes Enterprise Brokers on low-cost, credit-card sized computer systems known as Raspberry Pis and ship one to every Acacia location. Raspberry Pis value lower than $100 apiece, and we’d be capable of reuse them for future acquisitions.
As straightforward as pi
Putting in and configuring ThousandEyes on every Raspberry Pi took lower than half-hour. Then we simply shipped one preconfigured gadget to every Acacia website. We included easy directions—basically, “Please plug this in close to an worker’s desk and join it to the community.” As soon as linked, the Raspberry Pi mechanically phoned dwelling to our ThousandEyes server to verify for software program updates. Finished!
Delivery {hardware} to India takes a very long time due to import restrictions, so in Acacia’s Bangalore workplace, we deployed ThousandEyes on a digital machine as an alternative.
Testing the end-to-end person expertise
I spent about an hour on the ThousandEyes net interface organising artificial checks to measure latency, packet loss, and bandwidth between every set of two Acacia places. I additionally wrote a check to simulate the person expertise when loading the house web page for cloud companies like Cisco Webex, Workplace 365, and Salesforce.
Assessments run each half-hour. ThousandEyes makes it straightforward to identify excessive latency. In Determine 1, the spike reveals excessive latency for site visitors flowing from Acacia’s Ottawa, Canada workplace to Holmdel, New Jersey.
Determine 2 reveals latency alongside the community path from 10 of Acacia’s websites to their Massachusetts knowledge middle. It isolates a connectivity challenge with the Acacia Shenzhen website to a single hop alongside the trail—invaluable data that helped our acquisition and operations groups perceive the influence of the difficulty and resolve it.
I additionally added a view that plots the values on a map of the world.
Backside line: we perceive the person expertise on a community we will’t entry
Summing up, ThousandEyes on Raspberry Pis offers us a easy approach to verify that new workers from an acquisition will proceed to have the identical nice expertise once they transfer onto our community. If not, we’ll make modifications. Configuring the Raspberry Pis and organising the ThousandEyes checks took simply half a day. And all Acacia needed to do was plug in a tiny laptop to face in for a person laptop computer. Such a chic answer requires a poem:
ThousandEyes on Raspberry Pis
Arrange is a breeze
Raspberry Pis for Thousand Eyes
Take a look at latency with ease
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Workers do their very own efficiency troubleshooting with ThousandEyes
Zeroing in on community efficiency points with ThousandEyes
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