Distributed Latency Monitoring at Black Hat

With Matthew Bair

2026 marks the fourth consecutive year we’ve used ThousandEyes to monitor the Black Hat USA network for latency. Our first deployment in 2023 featured a small fleet of Raspberry Pi’s with (officially unsupported!) wireless NICs running the ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent in a custom build configuration. Over the years, the hardware has improved to beefier Orange Pi’s with their own built in wireless NICs, rather than add-on external antennas, the fleet of agents has multiplied in number, and we’ve added key control and automation capabilities.

As our latency monitoring mesh has expanded to cover more and more of the conference, we’ve also begun supplementing our ThousandEyes monitoring with on-demand Linux commands to track latency across different protocols. In this blog post, we’ll take a quick review of the deployment as it stands today, and show a few examples of the Linux based monitoring we’ve incorporated into our monitoring mesh of…