Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Happy New Year and welcome to Coder Radio. So it's been a couple weeks. Took a little hiatus for the holidays. I hope you guys had a great time. I got a lot to share with you. First off, a little housekeeping. Do get in that Discord. A lot of people are posting jobs. A lot of people are posting projects. Good stuff. Also, we have some events I'll be attending.
Microsoft AI Tour coming up at the end of January. I think it's like the 23rd.
first if i'm not mistaken that's in new york city so if you're there give me a give me a shout and also scale that's right the big southern california linux expo finally getting over to that west coast i'll be there also we have a promo code 40 off your ticket if you want to go that's in the show notes uh should be good finally miss miss i gotta be with the linux people the charger continues
But for today, we have a really good show. We have a Merturza doctor from Thousand Eyes, which is a Cisco company brand. I wasn't super clear on that. But we talk a lot of high-level AI networking stuff, really industrial grade. Well, it's Cisco, right? It's Thousand Eyes. It's... It's pretty enterprise-y, but in a really good way.
This might be a little more complicated, a little more, I don't want to say, I guess advanced is the right word, than our usual content. Part of that is for the new year, we're going to have a couple, every once in a while, a more hard-hitting, deeply technical episode. So that should be fun for folks who've been asking for that. But we're going to keep the light, high-level stuff too.
This is kind of a maiden voyage. Merchurus is awesome, super smart. I also want to thank him for, after recording, he sent me a Thousand Eyes t-shirt, which is fun to walk around because it kind of looks like the Eye of Sauron. So there's always, you know, that Lord of the Rings angle you got to love. Do keep an eye out. A merch link is coming up with the new logos.
We're going to have shirts and I think a few things that are fun. Not robes. There will be no robes. Robes are never happening. That was a terrible, terrible idea the first time. even though it's the best robe ever. And if you have one, it will be a collector's item forever. So there you go. All right. Well, enjoy the show. All right.
As promised, I'm here at Murtaza Doctor from Cisco Thousand Eyes. Murtaza, how are you doing? I'm good, Michael. How are you? I'm feeling good. I do feel like I'm being watched. A Thousand Eyes is quite a bit.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to talk a lot about Thousand Eyes and talk about our fun topic today as well.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of ThousandEyes within Cisco?
I'll say this, you know, broadly, ThousandEyes was founded a little over a decade ago, I would say. And it started on a very, very simple idea. What if you could see the internet the same way you could see your internal network? And that underlying premise obviously stands true to today as well.
And because our apps have moved to SaaS and cloud, the internet became part of our delivery path, but totally opaque to everyone. And that's why also ThousandEyes is actually known as the Google Maps for the internet. So what we do actually is we run billions of measurements a day, and this happens across the cloud. It happens with ISPs, CDNs, DNS, SaaS paths.
So if a major provider starts having issues, we see it often before they do. And I'll just tell you this, we have a very popular t-shirt, which actually I'm wearing right now, which is go ahead, blame the network. I love it. Yeah. And this is a t-shirt we actually customers love to wear during war rooms.
Absolutely.
That's how war rooms actually start, right? And once people started leveraging ThousandEyes, the network team suddenly got very quiet because now they have data to prove their innocence.
I can tell you, we're recording this on the 18th of December, folks. And I'm sure a lot of ISVs such as myself had a tough week last week with the CloudFlare outage. A lot of bad conversations with clients there. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Right. So, I mean, I would love to get you a T-shirt, Michael, as well. I love it. Hopefully it can get into your wardrobe as well. But I think with the journey of Thousand Eyes, obviously we started as a startup and then we got acquired by Cisco in 2020. And this is when we joined the superpower.
And the fantastic thing about that is Cisco has all of the visibility, the control across multiple domains, switching, routing, Wi-Fi, SD-WAN. And then ThousandEyes comes in with this intelligence. So together now, you know, you can do a lot more and the visibility is, you can shine light through a variety of different things with ThousandEyes.
So, okay. So that kind of leads nicely into our core topic here. You know, I keep listening to podcasts and frankly CNBC, and they say the internet is changing because of AI and agentic AI. With all your eyes, what do you see?
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Chapter 3: How does ThousandEyes help visualize internet performance?
Absolutely, right? And you just nailed it. And not only that, it gives you what I would call it at auditable and standardized in a secure access way to get access to anything, like you said, like databases, APIs, file systems, tools, SaaS apps. everything through a very, very structured protocol.
So I really believe that with that standardization in effect, I think we can go a long way in terms of getting access to a variety of different contexts which you would need to drive in an agentic workflow.
Right. Because theoretically, if you just adhere to the standard tightly, you could write an MCP for almost anything. I mean, lots of things already have MCPs. You mentioned GitHub. I think Atlassian does too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So your internal systems, let's say you have an internal enterprise application. I don't know, like some kind of ERP or something.
You theoretically could have that hooked into an MCP that also communicates with ThousandEyes to... I mean, maybe I'm getting a little too paranoid in my work with the MRO people, but look for weird network incursions, right? Are people trying to upload strange things to your internal ERP?
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think all of those are very, very genuine examples, I would say, Michael, of real-world use cases of MCP, and we heavily use it. We expose a lot of our intelligence and capabilities through MCP. where customers can then integrate that. But you nailed it.
I mean, this is the de facto standard and any standard access you need where your agent wants to have an interface or drive action, it's a great way to get access to it.
Nice. I also took a look at your developer page here. I love that you have Postman collections ready to go. I use Postman all the time. So that's, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, we really want to, I mean, you know, we really serve the, you know, the developers there and we want to make sure like, It's the easiest way to integrate more into, I would say, an operational workflow, which they are used to driving. And what better if we can make that easy, whether it's through scripting and variety of snippets and other things.
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Chapter 4: What role does AI play in enhancing network reliability?
And this is a very, very powerful area. And I think what it enables is, we can detect config issues happening in real time. And the idea is to correlate cloud paths, routing and user experience. So we all know that the biggest issues happen when you start changing your config or fat fingering config files.
so this particular product actually allows you to simulate changes before your deployment and auto detect any drifts in configuration right and if you think about a multi-domain assurance across cloud and routing and other things this becomes a real thing right so Just to highlight, one of our customers actually had an intermittent purchase failure in a multi-API workflow.
And Cloud Insights, which is one of our products, it correlated the user impact. It went ahead and figured out the path degradation. You know, it looked at a routing change which was made, a config push, and then produced the root cause in under two minutes, right? And a human team would take hours figuring it out.
And this would be like a toss call happening or an escalation call where every team would come on board and we're trying to figure out. And look at the root cause here. The root cause started with just a configuration change.
That's impressive. Yeah. The old way, that's ordering a pizza and everybody's working late situation. It's a good day for Domino's, a bad day for you.
Yeah. And look at the example we had. So on November 18th, we had a major cloudflare outage. And what we observed from a ThousandEyes perspective is We actually saw the network paths to Cloudflare's front end were clean. There were no spikes in latency. There was no packet loss. The internet paths look all green, but the application traffic was failing with timeouts and 500s.
And this is a classic backend service failure, not a routing. or a path issue, right? Now, imagine this outage in an agentic-driven world. Cloudflare sits between users and APIs for everything, right? Whether you're talking about, you know, OpenAI, you know, X, Anthropic, dozens of more things, right? So when Cloudflare's back and broke, entire agent workflows would have failed.
They would have retried, they would have cascaded, the load would have multiplied. And that's, I think, brings back to your original thing, which we just discussed that that's why our SLEs matter. And that's why ThousandEyes is so relevant because we focus on SLEs to drive those experiences for our customers. And that's what really matters, right? So it doesn't really matter.
And in this case, right, the path was green, you know, and the workflow was catastrophically failing. So you can see the impact of some of these outages happening and Obviously, we as ThousandEyes, we love to shed light on some of these things. We actually submit our reports around these outages as well.
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Chapter 5: What is agentic AI and how does it differ from traditional AI?
I will say this, right? Like, you know, on the topic of agentic AI and the world we live in now, in my personal life, I use a tool called Notion. Yes. And I love it because it's kind of my personal assistant, my personal diary, if you will. All of the travel which I plan, any personal projects I'm planning, I'm planning a variety of different things.
I just love it because I can organize my thoughts so well in it. And not only that, it gives me like a little bit of a flow in my to-do items. Am I connecting my calendar with it to figure out like, am I getting actually things done? It actually has improved my productivity quite a bit, Michael. And it fits in seamlessly with my workflow. I just don't feel like I'm transacting with it.
It just feels very natural in the way I use it on a day-to-day basis. And to be honest, I'm pushing my family and friends and others to use it as well so that I can share things through Notion as well. It's an ongoing battle which I'm fighting.
I still take my notes on a pencil and paper, on graph paper, but I hear amazing things about Notion. You've got to be, in the last month, the third or fourth person to tell me that you got to try Notion. I'm living back in the 50s here with my pencil and graph paper.
Whatever makes you productive, but we all have our different ways of driving things. To date, I also am using sticky notes and it drives my wife nuts. Like, why do you have all these sticky notes lying around? I'm like, I just function better like that. Now I'm just trying to take my sticky notes and move it to Notion.
It makes a ton of sense. Well, Murtaza, thank you for coming on. We'll throw any links in the show notes for Thousand Eyes and anything else you want to share with the folks.
No, this was an amazing experience. I really appreciate the time. And I really believe that we're heading into a world where things are dramatically changing. Digital resilience now means like end-to-end visibility. And we are in a world where assurance means that the networks never sleep, the agents never stop, and every interaction matters.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a big transitional period. It's going to be a big change. All right, Martaza. Well, we'll hopefully talk to you again soon.
Absolutely, Michael. Thank you.
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