Cisco-owned network performance monitoring vendor ThousandEyes turned its watchful gaze to software-as-a-service application (SaaS) performance today.

The vendor's Application Outages service is an extension of its popular Internet Insights product, explained Angelique Medina, director of product marketing at ThousandEyes, in an interview with SDxCentral.

As its name suggests, Internet Insights monitors communication service providers and cloud networks for disruptions that could negatively affect customer operations. Application Outages takes this a step further and offers a more granular analysis of SaaS application performance and uptime, she explained.

“We got a lot of feedback from our customers that they wanted to get a more application-centric view,” Medina said, “So we’ve added application providers starting with the major business applications that customers primarily use.”

As enterprises transition to remote and hybrid work models, pinpointing the source of network and application disruptions has become more challenging, she explained. “There are so many more wildcards in terms of their environment.”

This changing dynamic has created a scenario in which, if a critical SaaS app goes down, IT teams may be inundated with support tickets. Adding the new service provides an application-by-application view into how business-critical SaaS apps are performing, allowing IT to proactively warn users of an outage, she explained.

According to Medina, the platform doesn’t just provide up-time monitoring, it uses ThousandEye’s globally distributed agents to actively probe popular SaaS applications for HTTP responses and server errors.

Just because an application is reachable, doesn’t mean it’s working as intended or responding to input, she added.

Medina sees benefits for both SaaS providers and consumers.

In addition to flagging application disruptions that may affect users, the service can also provide valuable insights for the application developers, she said. For example, the platform could determine that the problem is related to domain name system (DNS) resolution errors, thus enabling developers to remediate the problem faster.

The service also allows enterprises to compare SaaS applications based on their reliability and performance using historical data gathered by ThousandEyes. “A lot of our customers are now managing an insane number of services,” she said.

Application Outages is available today as an additional subscription service for ThousandEyes Internet Insights. Alongside the paid service, the vendor also launched a free internet outage map, available to the public today.

Unlike existing sites, like Downdetector, the ThousandEyes outage map doesn’t rely on user-reported issues and instead pools the vendor's network intelligence to provide accurate real-time insights, Medina claimed.

Today's announcement marks Cisco's latest move in its full-stack observability strategy.

Cisco acquired ThousandsEyes in early 2020 in a deal valued at $1 billion. Earlier this year, the company paired ThousandEye’s network monitoring functionality with AppDynamics application monitoring capabilities to accelerate root cause analysis and eliminate blind spots holding up the adoption of SaaS, internet, and cloud services.

Alongside the integration, Cisco also paired ThousandEyes' monitoring agents with its Viptela SD-WAN appliances to further improve WAN visibility.