Cisco scooped up another network observability company, acquiring U.K.-based SamKnows, which the networking giant will integrate into its expanding ThousandEyes network assurance platform. The deal comes just a week after Cisco bought Accedian for the same ThousandEyes-bolstering purpose.

SamKnows is a privately held network observability provider that is focused on monitoring broadband connections. It uses millions of “vantage points” on home routers and mobile devices that glean insight into the performance of corresponding internet service providers (ISPs). The company explained that its platform is similar to speed-test applications like Ookla and Fastly.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has used the SamKnows platform as part of the government agency's Measuring Broadband America program.

Cisco is looking to bring that experience into its ThousandEyes product.

“This allows us to now add millions of different home and mobile vantage points to ThousandEyes’ already expansive coverage across internet, cloud, enterprise and hybrid-workforce networks,” Joe Vaccaro, VP of product for ThousandEyes, explained in an interview with SDxCentral. Vaccaro added that this stretches the boundary of ThousandEyes’ end-to-end view.

“This allows us to then stretch and allow service providers to further test and understand the experience through the eyes of their consumers, their customers, by actually easily integrating a vantage point onto that home router that's present in their home,” Vaccaro said. “For ThousandEyes, that's critical because end-to-end assurance really means end to end. You need to be able to test from all the different locations that matter to them.

"Historically, we have had the ability to run on a user's laptop, but we had no other way to gain visibility from the individual homes where people wanted to test from. Now with SamKnows, not only can we deepen the value for broadband service providers, but it also allows us to then further stretch that definition of end-to-end network assurance more deeply into home and mobile vantage points.”

Cisco framed last week’s Accedian acquisition at boosting the 5G network assurance and observability capabilities of its Networking Cloud efforts.

Kevin Wollenweber, SVP and GM for data center and provider connectivity at Cisco, noted in a blog post that the acquisition allows Cisco to link Accedian’s 5G network performance and user experience monitoring services into ThousandEyes. This is targeted at helping service providers better manage latency-dependent services running across 5G networks.

“Accedian greatly strengthens Cisco’s approach to assurance, helping to enable agility, efficiency and the scale that service providers need to drive success,” Wollenweber wrote. “Accedian’s service assurance portfolio of microsecond-level sensors and the powerful Skylight Analytics platform, coupled with Cisco’s robust portfolio, will enable Cisco to bring transformational solutions to our service provider customers."

Vaccaro said both deals are “really complementary as part of Cisco’s overall vision of providing broad end-to-end network assurance.”

“Accedian will be extremely valuable in helping to provide deeper visibility and intelligence into the core of the service provider network, where SamKnows provides the ability to then extend the visibility into that last mile where you're providing broadband services,” Vaccaro said. “Both of those will be complementary to ultimately what we want to provide at ThousandEyes, which is like a telescope view of that entire end-to-end journey.”

Both deals follow on Cisco’s recent update to its ThousandEyes and AppDynamics full-stack observability platforms. That update included the use of the open-source OpenTelemetry project to provide bidirectional data to both AppDynamics and ThousandEyes to help AppOps and NetOps teams.

“This enhancement to the customer digital experience–monitoring use case is automatically embedded to both Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes,” Carlos Pereira, Cisco fellow and chief architect of strategy, applications, emerging technologies and incubation, told SDxCentral. “It will help customers to get a complete picture of their application health, allowing them to make better-informed decisions and resolve issues quicker — ultimately leading to better user experience and improved business outcomes.”

Cisco has also been more closely tying its observability services into its growing security focus.

The vendor earlier this year rolled out its Business Risk Observability risk scoring service, which combines its Kenna Risk Meter score distribution with AppDynamics’ business transitions monitoring and insights. The service also has API and application security capabilities based on Cisco’s Portshift acquisition and supported by its Talos team’s threat intelligence.

Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of Cisco’s security business group, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview the observability and security capability integration is “a perfect example” of Cisco’s security business leveraging components from across the company.