Network monitoring company ThousandEyes expanded its network intelligence vantage points, called cloud agents, in order to serve new locations and meet growing demands for monitoring of modern infrastructures.

ThousandEyes customers can now leverage the cloud agents 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 expansion of the vantage points include: increasing the total number of cloud agents from 180 to 250, the deployment of new vantage points in six more metro locations, an increase in the number of IPv6 cloud agents, and the introduction of broadband ISP cloud agents.

The company’s VP of Product Marketing Alex Henthorn-Iwane said these expansions are in “response to growing market demand for network intelligence…The decision about where to place new vantage points was based on expanding our presence where we see enterprise locations and Internet users clustering generally across the globe.”

The network intelligence vantage points come 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.

According to Henthorn-Iwane, the cloud agents connect to Internet service providers like CenturyLink, Cogent, and NTT and provide an Internet "vantage point," or point of view, from various metro locations.

ThousandEyes increased its base of IPv6-enabled cloud agents by 150 percent to support the growing amount of software-as-a-service (SaaS), web, and mobile traffic that is moving to IPv6.

These vantage points also enable customers to compare performance between multiple broadband ISPs.

According to Henthorn-Iwane, the broadband ISP vantage points “provide businesses visibility into these networks, which are outside of their ownership or control, to better monitor the online experiences of their consumer and SMB customers.”

They connect broadband ISPs in six U.S. metro areas: Ashburn, Virginia; Chicago; Dallas; Los Angeles; San Jose, California; and Seattle.