Expanding the Google Cloud network observability partner ecosystem

At Google Cloud, we are committed to enabling cloud network observability for you wherever you are in your cloud migration and observability journey. As part of that commitment, we continue to provide tools for monitoring Google Cloud network infrastructure and services, such as Network Intelligence Center and Cloud Operations suite, while also ensuring that you can leverage our rich and actionable telemetry (metrics, logs, diagnostics) via other observability platforms. We believe that an open and thriving Google Cloud network observability partner ecosystem not only offers you choice but also empowers you to leverage your existing observability solutions, workflows, and skill sets to observe your Google Cloud workloads in a manner that’s tailored for your specific deployments (including hybrid and multi-cloud deployments).

We are working closely with several observability partners on ways we can together enhance our common customers’ network performance monitoring (NPM) experience. In particular, we’ve worked to streamline access to the necessary Google Cloud network telemetry, and support observability partners in creating NPM solutions tailored to your deployments and needs — both inside and outside Google Cloud. We are also working with partners to develop prescriptive best-practices guides for leveraging their NPM solutions for Google Cloud and beyond, incorporating our own best practices and learnings from customers over the years.

We are excited to highlight some of these key partners and solutions:

AppNeta by Broadcom 

AppNeta by Broadcom provides active network performance monitoring for any office, data center, and cloud environment. By providing a continuous, low-overhead way of monitoring managed and unmanaged networks, IT Operations teams can reclaim full visibility of their supporting networks and infrastructure. Migrating apps, workloads, or data to GCP puts logical and physical distance between your users and business-critical functions. AppNeta provides insight from the end-user perspective to monitor connectivity from user locations to Google Cloud. With this visibility IT can identify when issues are occurring and quickly pinpoint the root cause. 

“By combining our comprehensive network management solutions with monitoring available from Google Cloud, customers now have the complete picture of network performance from end-user to database and back,” says Mike Melillo, Sr Director of Network Management Products (NetOps), Broadcom.

Learn more about AppNeta’s integration with Google Cloud here.

Catchpoint 

Catchpoint’s Network Experience solution provides proactive observability for the Internet’s most critical services, such as BGP and third-party services like CDN and DNS. Powered by the world’s largest independent observability network, with over 2400 vantage points worldwide, its award-winning Internet Performance Monitoring Platform enables users to monitor from where it matters, helping network professionals answer the “Is it Google or me” question for any external-to-Google-Cloud network paths. 

Catchpoint’s Network Experience solution supports powerful use cases such as network reachability, network engineering and traffic routing, vendor selection and management, and SASE & VPN monitoring. Further, Catchpoint’s tutorial enables customers to ingest test results into Google Cloud to accelerate diagnostics and troubleshooting. Catchpoint CEO Mehdi Daoudi emphasized the significance of the partnership with Google Cloud Networking, stating, “We are excited to work with Google Cloud and provide Google Cloud customers with a streamlined approach to identify issues before they impact their business.” 

Learn more about Catchpoint integration with Google Cloud here.

Datadog 

Datadog Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) gives customers visibility into network traffic between services, containers, availability zones, and any other tag in Datadog. Using network traffic data, DNS metrics, and flow data, Datadog allows customers to identify unexpected or latent service dependencies, optimize costly cross-network traffic, identify outages, and troubleshoot issues.

Datadog’s Google Cloud integration supports Google Cloud metrics, and includes explicit coverage of both metrics and logs for multiple networking services including Cloud Interconnect, Cloud Load Balancer, Cloud Router, and Cloud VPN.

Learn more about Datadog’s integration with Google Cloud here.

Kentik

Kentik provides rich network observability across public clouds and hybrid infrastructure to give network engineers the context to rapidly answer any question about their networks. Enterprises use Kentik to optimize performance, resolve network incidents, improve security posture, reduce cloud costs, and maximize ROI and performance of public cloud migrations.

Kentik collects, analyzes, and contextualizes Google Cloud VPC Flow Logs and performance data, enriching network telemetry with deep application, business, and security context. With Kentik, Google Cloud customers can quickly understand path and performance details of traffic routes that connect Google Cloud workloads to data centers; reference live, always-up-to-date visualizations of Google Cloud infrastructure topology along with private-cloud and intra-cloud connectivity; and create custom dashboards to visualize important cost and performance trends.

“Unifying network telemetry across all clouds and data centers enables enterprises to make data-driven decisions, optimize resources, and achieve peak performance and security for their network infrastructure. Google Cloud’s approach to deployment and design enables Kentik to give our customers the unified observability they need.” - Justin Biegel, COO, Kentik

"Kentik’s Google Cloud and Kubernetes observability allowed us to investigate traffic on Google Cloud VMs and Kubernetes clusters, including the separation of workload namespace to help simplify our suite of tools used for reporting and troubleshooting.” - Louis Bolanos, Staff Cloud Network Engineer, Box, Inc.

Learn more about Kentik’s integration with Google Cloud here, and read about using Google Cloud VPC Flow Logs with Kentik here.

New Relic

New Relic helps Google Cloud customers get relevant insights into their cloud network performance by ingesting and analyzing Google Cloud VPC Flow Logs. Once configured through their guided install process, New Relic also enables customers to drill into their traffic patterns and troubleshoot connectivity issues.

“Understanding how network traffic impacts the performance of applications is crucial, which is why New Relic is excited to release our Google Cloud integration for VPC flow logs, eliminating blindspots for Devs, Ops, and SRE teams,” said New Relic Chief Strategy & Design Officer Peter Pezaris. “With VPC flow logs now alongside application and infrastructure telemetry data, teams have one place to troubleshoot and resolve performance issues in their Google Cloud environment.”

Learn more about using Google Cloud VPC Flow Logs with New Relic here.

Splunk 

Splunk Observability Cloud offers deep network performance monitoring functionality for customers with Google Cloud deployments. Observability Cloud integrates directly with Google Cloud and analyzes metrics for multiple networking services including Cloud Interconnect, Cloud Router, and Cloud VPN. Additionally, Observability Cloud's Network Explorer captures data directly from applications and host operating systems to network anomalies, discovers sources of potential high network costs, and visualizes service topologies. Network Explorer leverages kernel collectors and OpenTelemetry to provide this visibility.

“Splunk and Google Cloud have worked closely together for years to make it easier for people to gain deep visibility into their services, storage, computing infrastructure, and network performance. This is demonstrated through Observability Cloud functionality like Network Explorer and both firms’ deep commitment and contributions to OpenTelemetry.” - Morgan McLean, Director of Product Management

Learn more about Splunk’s integration with Google Cloud here. 

ThousandEyes, part of Cisco

ThousandEyes is a SaaS-based network assurance platform that provides customers with continuous, real-time visibility into their internet-enabled, cloud-delivered, and on-premises applications. ThousandEyes provides network path visibility, no matter where the applications, or your users, are located.

The jointly developed ThousandEyes Test Templates for Google Cloud encapsulate our recommended best practices, and make it simple for customers to set up and run tests internally or externally to gather path visualization and performance metrics for Google Cloud-reliant services. Customers running these tests can identify the location and impact of an issue internally or externally affecting their Google Cloud services. Customers can then share their tests with Google Cloud to accelerate diagnostics and troubleshooting. 

“Our strong partnership with Google Cloud enabled us to collaborate on a turnkey set of templates that follow the best practices and recommendations from both ThousandEyes and Google Cloud Support teams. Our joint customers can now deploy comprehensive network and service visibility for their critical Google Cloud services at the push of a button.” - James Parnham, Group Product Manager, Cisco

Learn more about ThousandEyes’ integration with Google Cloud here. 

The journey continues

Through collaboration with our partners, we are improving our customers’ end-to-end NPM experience while empowering them to meet their network observability needs in the manner that works best for them. We will continue to expand the breadth and depth of the solutions in our partner ecosystem to help drive our customers’ success. Stay tuned!