What’s new with Google Cloud network observability partner ecosystem

At Google Cloud, our mission is to meet you where you are in your observability and cloud transformation journey – by delivering observability solutions that are customized to your specific deployments, both inside and outside Google Cloud, and aligned with your existing observability tooling and workflows. To that end, last year, we expanded our network observability partner ecosystem. 

Today, we’re excited to introduce a number of new network observability solutions and feature enhancements from our partners, as well as two new partners with customized solutions for GKE network observability: Selector and Tigera. We’ve also published our Observability Solutions page as a centralized resource for you to learn about our observability offerings, including partner solutions.

Partner solutions highlights 

Our network observability partners offer a wide range of solutions integrated with Google Cloud. Here are some highlights on new observability solutions and enhancements from our partners: 

AppNeta by Broadcom 

AppNeta by Broadcom provides active performance visibility for internal and external networks from the end-user perspective focused on hybrid and multicloud observability. Since launching AppNeta on Google Cloud Marketplace last year, there have been two major enhancements around deployment at scale and ease of use. 

Monitoring Policies allow customers to streamline the setup of monitoring for dynamic, large-scale sets of Monitoring Points, significantly reducing time and effort. Paths can be automatically created and deleted based on a set of rules; for example, if a core application is used only in particular geographic regions, a policy can automatically monitor the application only from the Monitoring Points in that region (based on an integrated custom tagging feature).

AppNeta’s scale and ease-of-use enhancements provide deeper visibility into cloud networks for performance validation. You can view network performance site-to-site, site-to-cloud, and cloud-to-cloud for business-critical apps and services by combining various monitoring data sources.

Catchpoint 

Catchpoint’s integration with Google Cloud provides visibility into the dynamic infrastructure connecting users to cloud workloads, enabling teams to instantly visualize Catchpoint data alongside Google’s real-time performance metrics. This includes powerful network experience capabilities like real-time BGP monitoring, network mesh testing, and Traceroute ECN. You can further enhance these with Internet Sonar for a real-time view of  third-party outages worldwide. 

Catchpoint’s recently released Test Suites for Google Cloud provide independent, objective, end-to-end visibility into Google Cloud offerings including Spanner, BigQuery and others. They auto-create customizable, cross-network stack tests to Google Cloud, offering rigorous, end-to-end monitoring at the HTTP, DNS and network-path level.

Powered by the world’s largest independent observability network, Catchpoint’s Internet Performance Monitoring platform monitors from where it matters, answering “Is it Google or is it me?” for external-to-Google Cloud network paths. 

Catchpoint’s Google Cloud Monitoring is used by Riskified and many other companies to proactively monitor Google Cloud performance, ensuring end-to-end user experience.

Datadog 

Datadog’s Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) and Network Device Monitoring (NDM) provide a holistic SaaS-based solution for monitoring Google and hybrid cloud infrastructure, as well as on-prem network devices. 

With NPM and NDM, you can monitor connections and traffic between hosts, processes, Kubernetes clusters, availability zones, regions, and other tagged entities, in addition to devices such as switches, routers, firewalls, and load balancers from leading vendors. This allows you to visualize the complex web of connections in your cloud deployments or between devices, making it easy to pinpoint, troubleshoot and remediate connectivity issues across environments and software stack layers. 

One of Datadog’s newest capabilities is the ability to create monitors based on TCP or DNS network metrics that send an alert if a certain threshold has passed (e.g., traffic throughput, TCP latency, or DNS failures). These monitors enable customers to proactively respond to network issues. 

Kentik

Kentik recently upgraded its Kentik Cloud, which brings network observability to cloud and hybrid environments, by collecting VPC Flow Logs from Google Cloud and providing comprehensive network visibility, analytics and troubleshooting insights to cloud engineers and operators. Kentik Cloud addresses an important element of cloud observability via easy VPC Flow Logs management, minimizing the management challenges of large cloud network deployments, and lowering the cost of cloud data management. Key benefits include gaining powerful insights into cloud networks at scale, interactive maps of connectivity and data flows across your various cloud deployments, and building customizable dashboards to monitor hybrid environments. 

Kentik customer Box uses the platform to monitor and manage its Google Cloud deployments. 

“Visibility into cloud-deployed Kubernetes clusters in Kentik is super clear and makes troubleshooting so much easier.” - Louis Bolanos, Staff Cloud Network Engineer, Box, Inc.

ThousandEyes, part of Cisco

Cisco ThousandEyes continues to innovate with new network visibility and assurance capabilities in partnership with Google Cloud. One of these is Google Cloud path enrichment, which adds Google Cloud-specific data to Cisco ThousandEyes end-to-end network path visualizations. If the traffic is destined for a host or service within Google Cloud, Cisco ThousandEyes now shows IP and location/region information to help identify where and when traffic is crossing into Google Cloud’s network. 

Additionally, Cisco ThousandEyes test data and metrics can now be exported via OpenTelemetry and streamed into Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. This allows you to easily ingest Cisco ThousandEyes visibility data alongside metrics from Google Cloud and other monitoring tools to give a holistic view of user experience.

Lastly, Cisco ThousandEyes has expanded the comprehensive list of Test Templates to include Google’s AI offerings. Test Templates make it easy to monitor Google API service endpoints and get actionable network and health insights across your Google Cloud services.

Welcome new partners! 

We are thrilled to welcome two new partners to our ecosystem: Selector and Tigera. 

Selector

Selector’s AI-driven NPM solution removes the guesswork from daily network operations challenges while adapting to the needs of Google Cloud customers managing cloud and hybrid networks.

With Selector, telemetry is continuously collected and analyzed across a broad range of services, surfacing anomalies and connecting the dots as to what happened, where, and when. A comprehensive library of integrations lets operators leverage telemetry from key Google Cloud network services such as Cloud Interconnect, Cloud VPN, and VPC Flow Logs, as well as other virtual infrastructure and services. 

An integrated conversational AI, Selector Copilot, further streamlines incident investigation and remediation. Through the integration of LLMs and gen AI-driven natural language querying, Copilot provides summaries, recommendations, and automated remediations to help operations teams collaborate better and address incidents faster. 

“Google Cloud is a key partner for Selector,” said Kevin Kamel, VP of Product Management. “The collaboration allows us to offer our joint customers a seamless experience, providing comprehensive visibility across all their environments.”

Tigera

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud-native applications, containerized workloads and services in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments require network visibility and policy-based controls for DevOps teams, SREs, and platform owners. Tigera’s Calico Cloud integrates with Google Cloud to offer a comprehensive network observability and policy solution designed for the complexities of Google Cloud Kubernetes workloads. With Calico Cloud, you gain deep insights into workload communications, understand upstream and downstream dependencies, and identify network policy gaps or violations in GKE or self-managed Google Cloud deployments. This enhanced visibility lets teams monitor and troubleshoot communication issues across namespaces, microservices, and pods in real-time. By significantly reducing the time required to troubleshoot applications within Kubernetes, Calico Cloud supports strategic design decisions, optimal workload placement, and improved resiliency. Partnering with Google Cloud, Calico Cloud empowers organizations to navigate the challenges of distributed and agile cloud infrastructure, ensuring their cloud-native applications are both secure and performant.

Learn more 

We continue to enrich and expand our network observability offerings and work closely with our partners to improve your end-to-end NPM experience. Learn more about how our observability offerings and our partners’ integrations with Google Cloud can help meet your observability needs on our Observability Solutions page.