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ThousandEyes

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ThousandEyes monitors the performance of both local and wide-area networks. ThousandEyes combines Internet and WAN visibility, browser synthetics, end-user monitoring, and Internet Insights to deliver a holistic view of your hybrid digital ecosystem – across cloud, SaaS, and the Internet. It's a SaaS-based tool that helps troubleshoot application delivery and maps Internet performance.

Scope of support​

ThousandEyes parameters and supported features in Nobl9
General support:
Release channel: Stable Beta
Connection method: Agent Direct
Replay and SLI Analyzer: Not supported
Event logs: Supported
Query checker: Not supported
Query parameters retrieval: Supported
Timestamp cache persistence: Supported
Query parameters:
Query interval: 1 min
Query delay: 1 min
Jitter: 15 sec
Timeout: 60 sec
Agent details and minimum required versions for supported features:
Plugin name: n9thousandeyes
Query delay environment variable: THOUSANDEYES_QUERY_DELAY
Query parameters retrieval: 0.73.2
Timestamp cache persistence: 0.65.0

Nobl9 supports the following ThousandEyes metrics:

  • Network Latency: the interval time (in milliseconds) from sending a network packet to when the test-assigned agent receives the response.

  • Network Loss: the total loss of the network packet (in percents).

  • Page Load: the interval of time (in milliseconds) from the load event to the point when the website is loaded.

  • DOM Load Time: the interval of time (in milliseconds) required for the browser to build the website’s Document Object Model (DOM)

  • HTTP Server Response: the interval between the beginning of the request and the web server successfully sending the first byte of the response to the client.

  • HTTP Server Availability: the availability for a given agent. For HTTP Server Availability, Nobl9 receives status codes of an http response, for example, 200, 201, 400, or 501.

    warning

    When there are multiple ThousandEyes agents, Nobl9 can receive multiple HTTP response status codes in a single request. In this situation, Nobl9 ingests only the highest status code.

  • HTTP Server Throughput: the Wire Size divided by the Receive Time (in bits per second). For more information, refer to the ThousandEyes documentation.

  • HTTP Server Total Time: time (in milliseconds) of ThousandEyes agent receiving the last byte of your server's response.

  • DNS Server Resolution Time: time (in milliseconds) of ThousandEyes agent receiving the response from the DNS server about your domain.

  • DNS DNSSEC Valid: 1 if keychain for a domain record is valid, 0 otherwise.

Each measurement is obtained per ThousandEyes test interval.

note

For details about all ThousandEyes metric types, check ThousandEyes Knowledge Base | ThousandEyes documentation and ThousandEyes Test Data | ThousandEyes documentation.

The following table is an overview of the supported ThousandEyes tests and corresponding Nobl9 names:

NameResponse
property read		Nobl9 YAML nameAggregation*Minimum agent (supported channel)
Network >
End-to-End metrics		avgLatencynet-latencymean0.33.0 (stable, beta)
Network >
End-to-End metrics		Lossnet-lossmean0.33.0 (stable, beta)
Web >
Page load		pageLoadTimeweb-page-loadmean0.33.0 (stable, beta)
Web >
Page load		domLoadTimeweb-dom-loadmean0.33.0 (stable, beta)
Web >
HTTP server		responseTimehttp-response-timemean0.33.0 (stable, beta)
Web >
HTTP server		responseCodehttp-server-availabilitymax0.52.0 (stable, beta)
Web >
HTTP server		throughputhttp-server-throughputmean0.52.0 (stable, beta)
Web >
HTTP server		totalTimehttp-server-total-timemean0.68.0-beta01 (beta) 0.67.2 (stable)
DNS >
Server metric		resolutionTimedns-server-resolution-timemean0.68.0-beta01 (beta) 0.67.2 (stable)
DNS >
DNSSEC		validdns-dnssec-validlogical conjunction0.68.0-beta01 (beta) 0.67.2 (stable)

*) If your test returns more than one result per round.

warning

Whenever your ThousandEyes SLO has incompatible data source version/channel, the SLO config won't be served to your data source.

Creating SLOs with ThousandEyes​

Nobl9 Web​

Follow the instructions below to create your SLOs with ThousandEyes in the UI:

  1. Navigate to Service Level Objectives.

  2. Click .

  3. In step 1 of the SLO wizard, select the service the SLO will be associated with.

  4. In step 2, select ThousandEyes as the data source for your SLO, then specify the Metric. For ThousandEyes you can use only a threshold metric, where a single time series is evaluated against a threshold, The ThousandEyes metric specification has two fields: testID and testType.

    • Enter a testID. It is an ID of the test configured in ThousandEyes. It is a mandatory field, and it must be a positive number.

    • Choose a testType. It is a ThousandEyes metric. You can choose between the following ThousandEyes metrics supported by Nobl9 (refer to the Scope of support section for more details):

      • Network Latency

      • Network Loss

      • Page Load

      • DOM Load Time

      • HTTP Server Response

      • HTTP Server Availability

      • HTTP Server Throughput

  5. In step 3, define a Time Window for the SLO.

  • Rolling time windows are better for tracking the recent user experience of a service.

  • Calendar-aligned windows are best suited for SLOs that are intended to map to business metrics measured on a calendar-aligned basis, such as every calendar month or every quarter.

  1. In step 4, specify the Error Budget Calculation Method and your Objective(s).

    • Occurrences method counts good attempts against the count of total attempts.
    • Time Slicesmethod measures how many good minutes were achieved (when a system operates within defined boundaries) during a time window.
    • You can define up to 12 objectives for an SLO.

    See the use case example and the SLO calculations guide for more information on the error budget calculation methods.

  2. In step 5, add the Display name, Name, and other settings for your SLO:

    • Create a composite SLO
    • Set notification on data, if this option is available for your data source.
      When activated, Nobl9 notifies you if your SLO hasn't received data or received incomplete data for more than 15 minutes.
    • Add alert policies, labels, and links, if required.
      You can add up to 20 links per SLO.

  3. Click Create SLO.

sloctl​

Sample ThousandEyes web page load SLO
- apiVersion: n9/v1alpha
  kind: SLO
  metadata:
    name: api-server-slo
    displayName: API Server SLO
    project: default
    labels:
      area:
        - latency
        - slow-check
      env:
        - prod
        - dev
      region:
        - us
        - eu
      team:
        - green
        - sales
    annotations:
      area: latency
      env: prod
      region: us
      team: sales
  spec:
    description: Example ThousandEyes SLO
    indicator:
      metricSource:
        name: thousand-eyes
        project: default
        kind: Agent
    budgetingMethod: Occurrences
    objectives:
      - displayName: Good response (200)
        value: 200.0
        name: ok
        target: 0.95
        rawMetric:
          query:
            thousandEyes:
              testID: 2280492
              testType: web-page-load
        op: lte
        primary: true
    service: api-server
    timeWindows:
      - unit: Month
        count: 1
        isRolling: false
        calendar:
          startTime: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
          timeZone: UTC
    alertPolicies:
      - fast-burn-5x-for-last-10m
    attachments:
      - url: https://docs.nobl9.com
        displayName: Nobl9 Documentation
    anomalyConfig:
      noData:
        alertMethods:
          - name: slack-notification
            project: default

Important notes:

The ThousandEyes metric specification expects two fields: testID and testType.

  • testID is an ID of the test configured in ThousandEyes. It is a mandatory field, and it must be a positive number.

  • testType is an end-to-end ThousandEyes metric. It is a string field. Enter one of the below ThousandEyes metrics supported by Nobl9 (for more details, refer to the Scope of support section above).

    • net-latency

    • net-loss

    • web-page-load

    • web-dom-load

    • http-response-time

    • http-server-availability

    • http-server-throughput

When the testType field is missing in the ThousandEyes YAML configuration, net-latency value is assumed.

caution

If you want to apply http-server-availability and http-server-throughput as testType, update your agent to the 0.52.0 version.

Querying the ThousandEyes server​

Nobl9 queries the ThousandEyes instance once every minute. If the agent doesn’t collect any data in a given minute, the next query will be extended to the past two minutes.

ThousandEyes API rate limits​

The ThousandEyes API throttles API requests using a 240 request-per-minute (per organization) limit with each page having max 1000 elements included.

For a more in-depth look, consult additional resources:
Test dataExternal docsThousandEyes knowledge baseExternal docsThousandEyes end-to-end metricsExternal docsAgent metricsAgentCreating SLOs via TerraformTerraformCreating agents via TerraformTerraform
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