“The internet is down” might be the four most chilling words in the business lexicon today, as the world economy has become dependent on being online around the clock. Global e-commerce is expected to rise to $3.5 trillion this year, and there is no end to its continued growth in sight.

Against this backdrop of an “always-on” economy, ThousandEyes Inc. has created its business around monitoring internet performance, with six of the top seven U.S. banks and 20 of the top 25 software as a service companies already signed on as customers.

“If you can’t get to these emails or you can’t get to these collaboration apps today, it’s productivity down the hill,” said Archana Kesavan (pictured), director of product marketing at ThousandEyes. “As enterprises are moving to the cloud and relying on this internet-based delivery infrastructure, they’re starting to lose visibility into their critical customer-facing and employee-facing applications. What ThousandEyes does is give them back that control through visibility into that environment.”

Kesavan spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the scope of ThousandEyes’ monitoring technology and how it takes a proactive approach to avoid internet performance issues (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Tracking major cloud providers

ThousandEyes’ SaaS-based monitoring technology is currently deployed in 185 cities around the world, according to Kesavan. The firm also tracks the performance of major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. And it recently added Alibaba Cloud to the mix.

“Our secret sauce is how we look at all of these different layers that affect performance and we visually correlate them in a time sequence,” Kesavan explained. “We help customers very quickly pinpoint. You can see how application performance ebbs and flows.”

Earlier this month, ThousandEyes announced internet-aware Synthetics, designed for the proactive detection of application performance issues. Synthetics correlates insights gathered through tests of internet paths, network routing, and outage visibility.

“While you’re trying to understand application performance or how a website performs, synthetic monitoring replicates how a user would interact with that application,” Kesavan said. “We keep executing those steps periodically so you can understand if there’s any degradation of performance, if it’s slipped from baseline. You don’t want to have to understand performance after it has degraded.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: ThousandEyes Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither ThousandEyes nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE