Google Cloud’s network of observability partners Ecosystem

Developing the ecosystem of observability partners in the Google Cloud

Wherever you are in your cloud migration and observability journey, we at Google Cloud are committed to enabling cloud network observability for you. As part of that commitment, we will continue to offer tools for monitoring the network infrastructure and services of Google Cloud, including Network Intelligence Centre and the Cloud Operations suite, while also making sure you can use our comprehensive and usable telemetry (metrics, logs, and diagnostics) via other observability platforms. We think that an open and vibrant ecosystem of Google Cloud network observability partners gives you options as well as the ability to use your current observability tools, processes, and skill sets to monitor your Google Cloud workloads in a way that is customised for your particular deployments (including hybrid and multi-cloud deployments).

We are collaborating closely with numerous observability partners to find ways to improve network performance monitoring (NPM) for our shared clients. We have worked to make it easier for observability partners to create NPM solutions that are specific to your installations and needs, both inside and outside of Google Cloud. In particular, we have streamlined access to the essential Google Cloud network telemetry. Incorporating our own best practises and lessons learned from customers over the years, we are also working with partners to produce prescriptive best-practices guides for leveraging their NPM solutions for Google Cloud and beyond.

We are thrilled to recognise some of these significant collaborators and services:

Broadcom’s AppNeta

Any office, data centre, or cloud environment can benefit from active network performance monitoring offered by Broadcom’s AppNeta. IT Operations teams can regain complete visibility of their supporting networks and infrastructure by offering a continuous, low-overhead method of monitoring managed and unmanaged networks. By moving apps, workloads, or data to the Google Cloud Platform, you build a logical and physical barrier between your users and mission-critical operations. In order to monitor connectivity from user locations to Google Cloud, AppNeta offers insight from the end-user perspective. With this visibility, IT can recognise when problems arise and immediately identify their root causes.

Customers now get a complete picture of network performance from end-user to database and back thanks to the combination of our comprehensive network management solutions and monitoring made possible by Google Cloud, according to Mike Melillo, Sr Director of Network Management Products (NetOps), Broadcom.

Catchpoint

The most important Internet services, like BGP and third-party services like CDN and DNS, are proactive observable with the help of Catchpoint’s Network Experience solution. Its award-winning Internet Performance Monitoring Platform, powered by the largest independent observability network in the world with over 2400 vantage points worldwide, enables users to monitor from where it matters, assisting network professionals in determining “Is it Google or me?” for any external-to-Google-Cloud network paths.

Network reachability, network engineering and traffic routing, vendor selection and management, and SASE & VPN monitoring are just a few of the robust use cases supported by Catchpoint’s Network Experience product. In order to speed up diagnostics and troubleshooting, clients can ingest test results into Google Cloud using Catchpoint’s instruction. Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint, highlighted the importance of the collaboration with Google Cloud Networking by saying, “We are excited to work with Google Cloud and provide Google Cloud customers with a streamlined approach to identify issues before they have an impact on their business.”

Customers may view network traffic between services, containers, availability zones, and any other tag in Datadog thanks to Datadog Network Performance Monitoring (NPM). Datadog’s customers can find unexpected or latent service dependencies, optimise expensive cross-network traffic, spot outages, and resolve problems using network traffic data, DNS measurements, and flow data.

In addition to explicitly covering metrics and logs for numerous networking services, such as Cloud Interconnect, Cloud Load Balancer, Cloud Router, and Cloud VPN, Datadog’s Google Cloud integration also provides Google Cloud metrics.

Kentik

In order to give network engineers the context to quickly respond to any questions about their networks, Kentik offers rich network observability across public clouds and hybrid architecture. Enterprises utilise Kentik to increase ROI and performance of public cloud migrations, optimise performance, handle network problems, enhance security posture, and reduce cloud expenditures.

With the help of Kentik, Google Cloud VPC Flow Logs and performance data are gathered, examined, and contextualised, enhancing network telemetry with rich application, commercial, and security context. With Kentik, Google Cloud customers can reference live, always-up-to-date visualisations of Google Cloud infrastructure topology along with private-cloud and intra-cloud connectivity; create custom dashboards to visualise significant cost and performance trends; and quickly understand path and performance details of traffic routes that connect Google Cloud workloads to data centres.

Enterprises can make data-driven choices, optimise resources, and achieve the highest levels of performance and security for their network infrastructure by unifying network telemetry across all clouds and data centres. The deployment and design philosophy of Google Cloud enables Kentik to provide our customers with the comprehensive observability they require. COO of Kentik, Justin Biegel

“We were able to investigate traffic on Google Cloud VMs and Kubernetes clusters using Kentik’s Google Cloud and Kubernetes observability, including the separation of workload namespace to help simplify our suite of tools used for reporting and troubleshooting.” Louis Bolanos is a staff cloud network engineer at Box, Inc.

Fresh Relic

By ingesting and analysing Google Cloud VPC Flow Logs, New Relic enables Google Cloud customers to gain pertinent insights about the performance of their cloud network. Customers may delve into their traffic patterns and solve connectivity problems after configuring New Relic using their guided install method.

According to Peter Pezaris, Chief Strategy & Design Officer at New Relic, “understanding how network traffic impacts the performance of applications is crucial. That’s why New Relic is excited to release our Google Cloud integration for VPC flow logs, eliminating blindspots for Devs, Ops, and SRE teams.” Teams now have a single location to troubleshoot and fix performance issues in their Google Cloud environment thanks to the addition of VPC flow logs alongside application and infrastructure telemetry data.

Splunk

For clients using Google Cloud deployments, Splunk Observability Cloud delivers deep network performance monitoring features. Cloud Interconnect, Cloud Router, and Cloud VPN are just a few of the networking services that Observability Cloud natively integrates with Google Cloud to analyse metrics for. The Network Explorer feature of the Observability Cloud also collects data directly from apps and host operating systems to identify sources of potentially high network expenses and to visualise service topologies. To give this visibility, Network Explorer makes use of kernel collectors and OpenTelemetry.In order to make it simpler for people to get comprehensive visibility into their services, storage, computing infrastructure, and network performance, Splunk and Google Cloud have been collaborating closely for years. This is shown through Observability Cloud features like Network Explorer and both companies’ strong dedication to and contributions to OpenTelemetry. Director of Product Management Morgan McLean

ThousandEyes, a Cisco company

A network assurance technology called ThousandEyes, which is based on SaaS, gives users continuous, real-time insight into their internet-enabled, cloud-delivered, and on-premises applications. No matter where the applications or your users are located, ThousandEyes offers network path visibility.

Customers may easily set up and run tests internally or externally to acquire path visualisation and performance metrics for Google Cloud-dependent services thanks to the jointly created ThousandEyes Test Templates for Google Cloud, which incorporate our advised best practises. Customers that conduct these tests can locate and assess the effects of an internal or external problem that affects their Google Cloud services. Following that, clients might share their tests with Google Cloud to quicken analysis and troubleshooting.

“Due to our close relationship with Google Cloud, we were able to work together to develop a set of turnkey templates that adhere to the advice and best practises of the ThousandEyes and Google Cloud Support teams. At the touch of a button, our joint customers may now instantly deploy thorough network and service visibility for their essential Google Cloud services. James Parnham, Cisco’s Group Product Manager

The journey goes on

Through cooperation with our partners, we are enhancing the end-to-end NPM experience for our clients while enabling them to satisfy their network observability requirements in the way that is most convenient for them. To contribute to the success of our customers, we will keep broadening and deepening the range of the solutions offered by our partner ecosystem. Remain tuned!