ThousandEyes expanded its multicloud monitoring capabilities with the addition of Alibaba Cloud in a move to address infrastructure challenges in the Asian-Pacific market.

ThousandEyes' network monitoring technology is designed to allow enterprises to leverage vantage points inside of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms to measure cloud performance across multiple platforms and geographies. ThousandEyes claims this data allows companies to better plan and execute multicloud deployments.

According to ThousandEyes, the decision to extend support to Alibaba Cloud came down to performance challenges associated with deployments in the Asia-Pacific market.

“Global organizations today run on the internet, connecting applications and services to end-users everywhere, and making deep internet visibility non-negotiable, which is especially relevant for companies operating in Asia-Pacific where heavy sovereign controls impact Internet performance and digital experience,” said Joe Vaccaro, vice president of product at ThousandEyes.

In a blog post, ThousandEyes explained that enterprises have increasingly become reliant on the internet, but in many Asia-Pacific markets, internet performance can fluctuate wildly. This proved especially true in China, according to the company's own public cloud performance report published in 2018.

To address these challenges the company expanded its existing fleet of cloud agents in China with the addition of 19 Alibaba Cloud regions. This brings ThousandEye's vantage points to 53 cities in the Asia-Pacific market and 180 cities globally.

Alibaba is the latest cloud provider to gain support from ThousandEyes. Last year, the company extended multicloud support to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The inclusion of Alibaba Cloud — the largest cloud provider in China — is also a strategic one for ThousandEyes.

According to a recent Gartner research report, the IaaS market grew 31.8% in the last year, with Alibaba Cloud taking the top spot in China growing a prodigious 92.6% in 2018 alone.