RingCentral tapped ThousandEyes’ Network Intelligence platform to identify the regional impact of external service providers on its network. Most recently, the company used the platform to monitor its migration of services to their West Coast data center in preparation for Hurricane Florence.

RingCentral offers cloud-based business communications services like conference calling and call routing. It houses its core technology infrastructure and network in its data centers in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. RingCentral’s cloud is architected so that its services are always visible in redundant sites.

RingCentral has three data center regions in North America — East Coast, West Coast, and Mid-coast. In preparation for Hurricane Florence, RingCentral shut off its service to its East Coast sites, as they had the potential of being affected by the hurricane, and let the remaining sites take over the load.

“Even though they did not have data centers in the direct path of the hurricane, RingCentral understood that the ripple effects would spread all across the East Coast,” said Ameet Naik, ThousandEyes technical marketing manager. “They proactively migrated a few critical services to their West Coast data centers, and ThousandEyes provided them the external visibility to ensure service continuity throughout the migration. They could quantify the impact of this change and ensure it didn’t impact user experience.”

This monitoring function is one that could be used outside of emergency situations, such as the hurricane, to ensure that user experience does not falter when one or more of RingCentral's data center regions is shut off. They could be shut of for either routine service updates or maintenance.

RingCentral leverages a number of monitoring tools to measure and monitor its customer experience. And while RingCentral collects statistics from its internal network, ThousandEyes adds another layer of monitoring to give “a much more accurate view of customer experience since it covers not only our network but all the networks between us and the customers,” said Ashu Varshney, RingCentral's VP of cloud services operations and security. ThousandEyes assimilates RingCentral’s customer experience from 40-plus different locations internationally based on its ThousandEye agents.

RingCentral selected Thousand Eyes because “we couldn’t find a better solution,” said Varshney. According to him, the monitoring company made a natural synergy for the integration as they also offer cloud-based service. RingCentral deployed the service in the second quarter of the year.

In addition, ThousandEyes offered RingCentral an ease of deployment that it couldn’t find elsewhere. “Most of our alternatives would require us to build a network of our own by taking these pieces from different providers and ThousandEyes provides a fully included network that we can just plug in and start using,” Varshney said.

ThousandEyes network monitoring platform relies on network intelligence points, which it calls cloud agents. The cloud agents enable customers to more rapidly respond and troubleshoot network issues, compare customer performance across service providers, and increase overall performance of Internet-facing applications and services.

The agents are pre-deployed and ready-to-use for running active monitoring tests that simulate users connecting to an Internet Application. The software is deployed in global data centers, both virtually and physically. This year, the monitoring company expanded its network of vantage points to serve new cities and Broadband Internet service providers, and added support for multicloud environments.