Overview

Understand the ThousandEyes agent model and the workshop architecture across Kubernetes, ThousandEyes, and Splunk Observability Cloud.

10 minutes

ThousandEyes Agent Types

Enterprise Agents

Enterprise Agents are software-based monitoring agents that you deploy within your own infrastructure. They provide:

In this workshop, we’re deploying an Enterprise Agent as a containerized workload inside a Kubernetes cluster.

Endpoint Agents

Endpoint Agents are lightweight agents installed on end-user devices (laptops, desktops) that provide:

This workshop focuses on Enterprise Agent deployment only.

Architecture 

graph LR
    subgraph k8s["Kubernetes Cluster"]
        secret["Secret te-creds"]
        agent["ThousandEyes<br>Enterprise Agent<br>Pod"]
        subgraph apps["Application Pods"]
            api["API Gateway<br/>Pod"]
            customers["Customers Service<br/>Pod"]
            vets["Vets Service<br/>Pod"]
            visits["Visits Service<br/>Pod"]
        end
        subgraph svcs["Services"]
            api_svc["api-gateway<br/>Service"]
            customers_svc["customers-service<br/>Service"]
            vets_svc["vets-service<br/>Service"]
            visits_svc["visits-service<br/>Service"]
        end
        api_svc --> api
        customers_svc --> customers
        vets_svc --> vets
        visits_svc --> visits
        secret -.-> agent
        agent -->|"HTTP Tests"| api_svc
        agent -->|"HTTP Tests"| customers_svc
        agent -->|"HTTP Tests"| vets_svc
        agent -->|"HTTP Tests"| visits_svc
    end
    external["External<br/>Services"]
    agent --> external
    subgraph te["ThousandEyes Platform"]
        te_cloud["ThousandEyes<br/>Cloud"]
        te_api["API<br/>v7/stream"]
        te_cloud <--> te_api
    end
    agent -->|"Test Results"| te_cloud
    subgraph splunk["Splunk Observability Cloud"]
        otel["OpenTelemetry<br/>Collector"]
        metrics["Metrics"]
        dashboards["Dashboards"]
        apm["APM/RUM"]
        alerts["Alerts"]
        otel --> metrics
        otel --> dashboards
        metrics --> apm
        dashboards --> alerts
    end
    te_cloud -->|"OTel/HTTP metrics"| otel
    te_cloud -->|"Trace lookup"| apm
    apm -->|"Deep links to test"| te_cloud
    user["DevOps/SRE<br/>Team"]
    user -.-> te_cloud
    user -.-> dashboards
    user -.-> agent
    style k8s fill:#e1f5ff,stroke:#0288d1,stroke-width:2px
    style apps fill:#f3e5f5,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:2px
    style svcs fill:#f3e5f5,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:2px
    style agent fill:#ffeb3b,stroke:#f57c00,stroke-width:2px
    style secret fill:#ffcdd2,stroke:#c62828,stroke-width:2px
    style api fill:#e1bee7,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:1px
    style customers fill:#e1bee7,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:1px
    style vets fill:#e1bee7,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:1px
    style visits fill:#e1bee7,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:1px
    style api_svc fill:#ce93d8,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:1px
    style customers_svc fill:#ce93d8,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:1px
    style vets_svc fill:#ce93d8,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:1px
    style visits_svc fill:#ce93d8,stroke:#7b1fa2,stroke-width:1px
    style external fill:#c8e6c9,stroke:#388e3c,stroke-width:2px
    style te fill:#fff9c4,stroke:#f57f17,stroke-width:2px
    style te_cloud fill:#ffecb3,stroke:#f57f17,stroke-width:2px
    style te_api fill:#ffe082,stroke:#f57f17,stroke-width:2px
    style splunk fill:#ff6e40,stroke:#d84315,stroke-width:2px
    style otel fill:#ff8a65,stroke:#d84315,stroke-width:2px
    style metrics fill:#ffccbc,stroke:#d84315,stroke-width:1px
    style dashboards fill:#ffccbc,stroke:#d84315,stroke-width:1px
    style apm fill:#ffccbc,stroke:#d84315,stroke-width:1px
    style alerts fill:#ffccbc,stroke:#d84315,stroke-width:1px
    style user fill:#b2dfdb,stroke:#00695c,stroke-width:2px

Architecture Components

1. Kubernetes Cluster

2. Test Targets

3. ThousandEyes Platform

4. Test Types & Metrics

The Enterprise Agent performs:

Metrics collected include:

5. Splunk Observability Cloud Integration

6. Data Flow

  1. Agent authenticates using token from Kubernetes Secret
  2. Agent runs scheduled tests against internal and external targets
  3. Test results sent to ThousandEyes Cloud
  4. ThousandEyes streams metrics to Splunk via OpenTelemetry protocol
  5. For HTTP Server and API tests with distributed tracing enabled, ThousandEyes injects b3, traceparent, and tracestate headers into the request
  6. The instrumented application sends the resulting trace to Splunk APM
  7. ThousandEyes can open the related Splunk trace, and Splunk APM can link back to the original ThousandEyes test
  8. DevOps, network, and application teams collaborate across both views during an investigation

Testing Capabilities

With this deployment, you can:

Note

This is not an officially supported ThousandEyes agent deployment configuration. However, it has been tested and works very well in production-like environments.