Oracle launches global internet ‘health’ map

While major cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google have spent billions investing in their own networks to provide high-speed backbones, as have connectivity players like Verizon Enterprise, the fact remains that you still have to contend with regular internet traffic on a daily basis.

And if your connections to the cloud seem slow, blame Netflix and YouTube, as they account for half of all internet traffic.

With that headache in mind, the Oracle Internet Intelligence group has launched a free map of the global health of the internet, allowing enterprises to see where there are bottlenecks in internet traffic and perhaps route around them to their cloud providers.

The map provides users “with a simple, graphical way to track the health of the internet and gain insight into the impact of events such as natural disasters or state-sponsored interruptions,” Oracle said in a statement announcing the availability of the service.

This works only because most of the cloud giants have duplicate availability zones, like east coast and west coast. So, if one is down or unavailable, the other zone takes over. Normally that’s used for outages on their end, but with the Internet Map, you can see if there is an outage between you and your regional provider and switch to another location if possible.

Internet performance monitoring from Dyn

Oracle got the mapping technology when it acquired Dyn, an internet performance monitoring company, in 2016. Dyn would provide regular reports on things such as major attacks and downtime, but now that service is freely and regularly available to all.

“The internet is the world’s most important network, yet it is incredibly volatile. Disruptions on the internet can affect companies, governments, and network operators in profound ways,” said Kyle York, vice president of product strategy for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the general manager for Oracle’s Dyn global business unit, in a statement. “As a result, all of these stakeholders need better visibility into the health of the global internet. With this offering, we are delivering on our commitment to making it a better, more stable experience for all who rely on it.”

Latency between on-premises and cloud services can be an issue in some use cases, and it can be hard to pinpoint the reason why — beyond Netflix and YouTube. This allows network operators to pinpoint where the issue might be and react accordingly.

The Internet Intelligence Map presents country-level connectivity statistics based on traceroutes, BGP, and DNS query volumes on a single dashboard that is reminiscent of traffic reports on Google Maps. Google has hundreds of measurement servers around the world performing millions of traceroute checks every day to maintain the site.

The basic service is free, but Oracle is selling data sets for analytics and planning and troubleshooting tools.