ThousandEyes in Novartis company.

[michalowczarzy]

Greetings community,
I am Michal and I take care of ThousandEyes platform at Novartis company. 
Answers to my questions :

• Which features do you use, and how long did the implementation take? 
  Almost all except Internet Insights and Devices tab. We implemented ThousandEyes for 56 enterprise agents and many endpoint agents. I took us almost a year to learn, implement and get better in our processes.
• What business problems did you solve using ThousandEyes? Do you have an interesting use case to share? 
  We've solved many business problems. One of the more interesting ones pertains to the enterprise agent public repository, which was affected by company security restrictions. The solution was to create our own mirror repository, where every agent version is reviewed by the security team.
  
• What do you like most about the ThousandEyes platform? 
  The support. The support for this platform is amazing, ensuring that administrators don't feel alone when facing various issues.
  
• Do you have any exciting plans with the ThousandEyes platform?  
  We aim to implement monitoring for the Webex application, establish connectivity with Splunk using the OpenTelemetry Protocol, and automate the generation of real-time graphs via the Snow ticketing system using API calls.

[john74355]

Hi Michal, thanks for sharing. We are currently investigating the value of deploying enterprise agents on Cisco switches and routers and have encountered the same concern that you mentioned - "The solution was to create our own mirror repository, where every agent version is reviewed by the security team." We are looking into something very similar - could you share some more details?

For each agent version, do you open a change ticket/window? If you do have a change window, how long do you set the change window for all the agents to get automatically updated? My understanding is that the agents follow some sort of algorithm to determine when exactly to update themselves (ie: they do not all update at the exact same time).

How did you set up your mirror: did you script something to periodically pull the latest copy from ThousandEyes? Or is it more of a manual process, etc? Right now we have a dev linux server that runs a cronjob to pull down the latest every day and track changes via git. Our team likes to avoid manual work as much as possible.

[michalowczarzy]

Hi John,

Thank you for your engagement.

As mentioned earlier, we maintain a mirror repository. Upon agent installation, you can set up a remote repository for receiving new updates in config file.

In our case, the mirror repository is typically one version behind the official TE version. Our security team reviews and approves each version before it's pushed to the repository.

Our approach aligns with yours — we utilize a cron job. This cron job runs weekly to determine if a new version is available or not.

[abfentan]

Hello @michalowczarzy, thank you for posting your use case. We will reach out to you in the next 2 weeks with instructions on how to claim your t-shirt. Appreciate your participation in the Community!

[abfentan]

Hello @michalowczarzy, thank you for posting your use case. We will reach out to you in the next 2 weeks with instructions on how to claim your t-shirt. Appreciate your participation in the Community!

[michalowczarzy]

Hello,
thank you, cannot wait to claim my ThousandEyes T-shirt