ThousandEyes announced Agent-to-Agent Tests, designed to make it easier for network operations teams to quickly troubleshoot and pinpoint issues caused by performance degradation in the reverse path.

ThousandEyes provides visibility into every network segment, including the Internet, and with this new capability enables organizations to quickly see both forward and reverse paths. This more granular understanding enables networking teams to pinpoint precisely where issues are located and in which direction, leading to faster and more accurate issue resolution and higher service levels — critical as networks become more cloud-centric and less reliable.

"It is often forgotten that most network traffic is transactional and information can come back on a completely different path than the way it was sent when traversing the Internet," said Scott Cressman, Head of Product Management at ThousandEyes. "Traffic asymmetry is nothing new, but it's actually becoming more frequent. The adoption of direct Internet access, SD-WAN and software defined networking are driving more frequent path changes. By providing forward- and reverse-path insights, we're offering more complete path information and richer, intuitive unified visualization of the traffic flows between points. This helps organizations analyze Internet peering and troubleshoot provider issues or unexpected routing configurations."

ThousandEyes Agent-to-Agent Tests enables organizations to gain visibility into their cloud, SaaS and application and services deployments with the addition of bi-directional path visibility. Enterprise and Cloud Agents automatically map both forward and reverse paths between endpoints, providing richer context and practical visualizations. This provides network teams with the knowledge of exactly where a problem exists, enabling them to take immediate action and involve the responsible parties.

Routing between two end-points requires finding the best path across potentially multiple intermediary points, with each network applying its own policies, and this leads to a high likelihood of asymmetric paths. The level of asymmetry can be dependent on a number of factors including:

- Load-balancing algorithms, such as ECMP

- Routers with adaptive routing algorithms, like SD-WAN

- Business relationships and peering policies between networks

Agent-to-Agent Tests also includes network address translation (NAT) traversal, eliminating the need for manual configuration of NAT firewall rules. NAT traversal can automatically detect ThousandEyes agents behind the firewall so that if the internal IP address of the agent changes, the NAT rules don't need be updated.

ThousandEyes Agent-to-Agent Tests is now generally available to all users.