Today, I'm thrilled to announce that Twingate Insight Reports are now available as a self-serve option for all our customers! These reports provide administrators with an in-depth view of the status and activity of your Twingate Resources and network connections, so that you can make data-driven decisions about your network access and infrastructure.

Insight Reports help you identify high-traffic Resources, pinpoint critical issues such as connectivity errors, and highlight potential misconfigurations. With this information at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions about troubleshooting, Resource management, and performance optimization.

We've published these reports as an open-source project, and we're actively seeking feedback from our community. You can find step-by-step instructions in our docs, and explore the code, submit issues, or contribute enhancements in our GitHub repository.

Saying goodbye to the VPN paradigm

I lead Twingate’s Solutions Engineering Team, the technical “boots on the ground” helping organizations transition away from traditional VPNs as part of their Zero Trust initiatives. 

Throughout these projects, we noticed a recurring challenge: teams often struggle with the conceptual shift from a VPN paradigm to a Zero Trust paradigm. It's not just about replacing one tool with another—it's about fundamentally changing how you think about access control.

A common question we heard was, "If you don't know what people need access to, how do you restrict access to only what's needed?" This is the core paradox of implementing Zero Trust when migrating from a broad-access VPN solution.

As we supported more and more VPN replacement and Zero Trust projects, we discovered that many teams simply don't have visibility into their actual access usage patterns. Without this knowledge, implementing least-privilege access becomes a guessing game.

When you start restricting access without understanding usage, you run the risk of cutting people off from the systems they need to get work done. Not only does this put the brakes on productivity, it can derail the whole Zero Trust project: if key stakeholders think your Zero Trust initiative is getting in the way of work, they may just nix the whole thing.

This problem, a lack of visibility into usage, led to the birth of Insight Reports. We designed them to show you who has access to what resources, who actually accesses those resources, and what patterns emerge from that usage. With this information, you can confidently restrict access to only the specific resource that each user or group genuinely needs, moving you towards a true Zero Trust framework.

More data means more insights

The primary reason we built Insight Reports was to support your Zero Trust journey. They help you:

• Identify all your active services and servers across your network

• Understand who actually accesses what (versus who theoretically can)

• Build a robust policy model based on actual usage patterns

• Implement least-privilege access with confidence and without disruption

However, once we started creating these reports, we discovered that they offer lots of other benefits beyond Zero Trust implementation. 

Because of the amount of data you can gather through Twingate Network Events, there are tons of ways to slice and dice it to unlock historically opaque areas across your network and infrastructure.

Resource Management and Optimization

Insight Reports help you understand your resource utilization patterns:

• Which resources are most active?

• Which resources create the most traffic?

• Which resources are no longer required and can be decommissioned?

• Which services are being accessed, on which ports and protocols?

• How can you refine your resource definitions?

• How can you transition from broad definitions to narrow ones without disrupting necessary access?

Troubleshooting and Error Analysis

Quickly identify and resolve issues across your network:

• Which resources create the most errors for end users?

• Which resources are occasionally unreachable by Connectors?

• Which resources are occasionally unresolvable by Connectors?

• Who are the users experiencing the most errors?

Network Topology and Configuration Analysis

Gain insights into your network structure and potential configuration issues:

• Which addresses are served by more than one Resource?

• Which addresses are served by more than one Remote Network?

• Are there potential routing issues due to resource ambiguity for some users and resources?

User Activity Insights

Understand how your users interact with your network:

• Where are end users connecting from?

• How many different networks do users connect from?

• Who are the busiest users in terms of number of connections?

• Who are the busiest users in terms of bandwidth consumption?

Connector Health and Capacity Planning

Ensure your infrastructure is optimized and reliable:

• Are there Remote Networks lacking Connector redundancy?

• Is there any imbalance between Connectors in a single Remote Network?

• Would any existing Remote Network benefit from spinning up an additional Connector?

• Does increased activity on a Connector correlate to higher error rates?

• Do Connectors show any "seasonality" in activity load?

Building towards deeper visibility

Insight Reports represent just the beginning of our journey to provide you with deeper visibility into your network. We're actively working on making these reports easier to generate and parse, with more features coming soon.

For now, keep an eye on our GitHub repository for updates and enhancements. We're committed to evolving these reports based on your feedback and real-world use cases.

We want to hear from you! Please send us your feedback, suggestions, and use cases. Your input helps us make Twingate Insight Reports easier to use and even more useful as you progress on your Zero Trust journey.

Ready to get started? Visit the Insight Reports GitHub repository and documentation to begin exploring!