Dyn has developed a new tool that allows communications service providers to monitor and evaluate the performance of their connections with CDNs and other Internet partners.

Service providers have plenty of tools to monitor and test the performance of their own networks, but the fact that the rest of the network is conceptualized as "the cloud" says all anyone needs to know about any access network operator's visibility into what happens once any signal hits an interface to the open Internet.

Dyn does advanced DNS and traffic management, and it has over 200 vantage points (which is to say, probes) around the world, which helps make it one of the few companies that actually has a pretty good view of worldwide Internet traffic.

For example, Dyn claims to have been first to notice that North Korea's Internet went out right after the Sony hacks. The company was among the first to notice when Cuba began receiving Internet via submarine cables, and it was among the first to correctly diagnose the problem when Verizon wireless customers were recently unable to reach AWS East.

Dyn's new product, called II, is a SaaS (software-as-a-service) product. Customers get a deceptively simple dashboard that shows them their global cloud provider, content delivery network (CDN) and data center connections.

The dashboard provides data and visualizations of network availability, reachability (the server might be up, but is traffic actually getting through?), and performance (latency).

The tool can be used not only for cloud performance monitoring, but also to evaluate connectivity partners, Dyn's director of Internet performance, Charlie Baker, explained to Light Reading.

For example, a service provider might be doing business in both Asia and South America. The service provider's CDN partner might perform extremely well in Asia, but not in South America. The service provider could use Dyn II to select another CDN partner whose geographic strengths and weaknesses complement the first's.

Dyn II is part of the company's Internet Intelligence product suite. When Internet Intelligence is combined with Dyn's Traffic Management product for load balancing and geographic routing, companies can make changes to the routes of their traffic, allowing them to provide their customers with the best experience possible, Dyn said.

— Brian Santo, Senior Editor, Components, T&M, Light Reading