Cisco ThousandEyes

I have been using ThousandEyes for the past four years.

The main use case for ThousandEyes is in the visualization of paths and it also helps in troubleshooting, software optimization, and understanding where there is packet loss. It enables me to troubleshoot if there is a downtime and also provides visibility to notice if there is an internal network problem or ISP problems. These are the primary use cases. ThousandEyes enables me to be aware of any performance degradation before users report any problem or issues are being reported.

A great specific example where I used ThousandEyes in solving a problem is as a tool for troubleshooting. I use it in troubleshooting complex network applications, especially with the integration of ThousandEyes with AWS. We use it to monitor our ISP, our third-party services, and also to monitor our DNS and our software application performance. The usage of ThousandEyes really helped in creating an end-to-end visibility. Instead of guessing where there might be a network issue, ThousandEyes made it very clear whether the problem was in our internal network, ISP, or a third-party service.

ThousandEyes really helped me in noticing latency issues in our network. This really helps a lot for us to know how to improve our network, especially when it comes to performance issues or ISP issues. Also, in our cloud and SaaS performance monitoring, it helps us to monitor the actual users in our SaaS applications and also to detect packet loss outside our own infrastructure. Because our own infrastructure is hosted on AWS, ThousandEyes being hosted on AWS really helps us to detect any packet loss in our infrastructure and also notice any performance against incident periods and identify anomalies very clearly. Another good use case that helped me so well is that ThousandEyes helped me to confirm whether performance actually improved or if new issues were introduced, especially when I'm trying to monitor packet loss or latency issues.

ThousandEyes has really impacted my organization because my organization works a lot with SaaS products and also services other endpoints. It has really helped my organization to not have to hop from different endpoints to see exactly where latency loss or routing issues occur. It has also really helped our organization to understand the importance of performance observability and to understand the risk and single points of failure. The application of ThousandEyes on both internal and external services has helped us to better understand the idea of performance across regions and how internet conditions can vary globally.

There is a reduction in the time spent on root cause analysis. Sometimes, figuring out the root cause without concrete evidence of where the problem is can cause more errors and problems. With ThousandEyes, we are able to perform root cause analysis very effectively, and this also reduces the time spent on troubleshooting. Troubleshooting can be very complex, and if we don't have the right incident sensor, a lot of time can be wasted trying to troubleshoot a small problem. But with ThousandEyes' detection and the ability to provide the right agents, it makes troubleshooting very easy and reduces the time we waste. Faster troubleshooting is essential, and the detection of the root cause is great with the usage of ThousandEyes. I really recommend ThousandEyes for organizations that rely heavily on cloud services or external providers because it provides clear accountability when issues arise.

The best features that ThousandEyes offers are end-to-end network path visualization, and also cloud and internet performance monitoring across the public internet and cloud services. Also, agent deployments are a great feature. This includes deploying lightweight agents in different locations such as on-premises, cloud, and remote sites. This enables the measurement of real user paths and performance. Another great feature of ThousandEyes is its dashboard and historical baselines. The dashboards can enhance historical trends that help you compare against current performance and old performance. This is a great feature, especially when exporting reports that help to explain issues to executives, vendors, or customers during collaboration, reporting, and alerting processes.

I find all of them fascinating and great. You cannot really say one is better than the other because they all work in collaboration to help you detect problems. The end goal is always to present the historical baselines and reports to stakeholders. As a software developer, I find the end-to-end visibility fantastic because it reduces the stress of my work trying to figure out where there is packet loss or latency issues. Also, agent deployment helps in monitoring, detection, and internet performance, which is great. Then, the dashboard's ability to detect a historical trend provides great analysis. This reduces the need for separate data analysis or incorporating a third-party SaaS to explain historical trends. For me, all the features are great and make ThousandEyes stand out among other observability products. I find all of them fantastic. As a software developer, the end-to-end visibility comes first, but there is also the aspect of explaining to management what the issue has been. The operational features are really fantastic. It's a great collaboration where one cannot do without the other.

The feature that surprises me and is very prominent is the ability to deploy agents in cloud regions. I work very well with AWS, and this is a great feature integration with ThousandEyes. The ability to deploy agents in different cloud regions is a great key for monitoring, even on-premises or hybrid infrastructure. Also, custom alerts really help to reduce team noise and focus on real incidents. I find it fantastic. Another ability is the internet outage intelligence. This correlates with internet issues by monitoring the data. Right now, performance optimization is very important with the usage of SaaS products or when you host your infrastructure on a cloud. When there is an internet downtime, it causes heavy traffic. With ThousandEyes being able to detect and monitor this, it's fantastic for me. It reduces the workload and also reduces errors in trying to figure out where there is internet downtime, low visibility, or other incidents. I really find this aspect of ThousandEyes great. There could be improvement in the future, but for now, it works perfectly when you compare ThousandEyes with other observability products.

ThousandEyes can be improved based on path visualization. When you're trying to check exactly where traffic was impacted, the path visualization could be improved by pinpointing the actual performance problem and also detecting the right outages. For me, path visualization is a great area for improvement in ThousandEyes, as well as providing the right agents to detect where problems are occurring. Another area of improvement could be proactive incident detection. Incidents should be alerted on and traced early, before they escalate to full outages. With ThousandEyes, there should be the possibility of alerting on incidents. This helps in incident detection and being proactive so that time, which is essential, is not lost. An alert can be given so the problem can be solved very quickly. Alert detection and path visualization are two strong areas to improve on ThousandEyes.

The visual reports should be much easier to explain, for example, when explaining network issues to application teams and management. Also, when it comes to vendor accountability, the platform should be able to provide solid data to back up claims when working with service providers or on third-party issues. This is an aspect of integrating third-party providers on ThousandEyes, and especially when we talk about security, there should be solid data to back up claims. This would enable third-party vendors to know the essential work when they are integrated with ThousandEyes.

I chose eight out of ten because of the lack of objective performance data. With observability, performance data is very important, which isn't fully the case with ThousandEyes. Also, as I mentioned, path visualization needs improvement to provide better visibility into connectivity issues, especially with remote users across different regions. These are the two aspects I removed points for. ThousandEyes needs to improve its visibility, which can affect connectivity for remote users in different regions, and it needs to improve its path performance visibility. It also needs to improve its service level agreement in terms of performance data. It's all about the data, which is essential when explaining things to management or stakeholders.

The advice I would give others looking into ThousandEyes is that it's a great product. The ability to deploy agents in cloud regions is a key feature for monitoring hybrid, on-premises, and private cloud infrastructure. The custom alerts and dashboards help reduce noise and focus on real incidents, which is a great feature. Also, the ability for path visualization, addressing performance issues, and being proactive in troubleshooting complex network issues are great aspects of ThousandEyes. It can help organizations reduce the time they spend troubleshooting network issues or their ISP. Another aspect is the idea of proactive alerting, especially for latency loss thresholds. ThousandEyes is really good in that aspect, which can help define problems and improve current performance. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

Positive

My main use cases for ThousandEyes  at my current company are leveraging ThousandEyes  for digital experience, internet, and internet performance. I'm using ThousandEyes for full network path visualization and network performance, application delivery. I also leverage ThousandEyes for overall ISP, public cloud, edge service monitoring, and what we call digital experience monitoring, which we're using ThousandEyes' endpoint agents to monitor user-side network health, metrics, and application responsiveness. I'm also using ThousandEyes for website and SaaS delivery optimization as well.

I use ThousandEyes for digital experience monitoring by leveraging their endpoint agents to monitor user-side network health, such as Wi-Fi and VPN metrics and application responsiveness to ensure that our applications are performing, are performant and are meeting and exceeding delivery expectations.

We use ThousandEyes in conjunction with our full end-to-end, full-stack observability offering, and we're using ThousandEyes to address critical performance issues. This is to be proactive about knowing how to address issues before they arise and how to ensure that our applications are always performant.

The best features ThousandEyes offers are network path visualization, deep end-to-end full-stack visibility, and intuitive dashboards. All of these features allow us to formulate a comprehensive view of network performance and how our applications are meeting and exceeding performance thresholds based on SaaS performance, network path visibility, and other attributes.

The intuitive dashboards really allow us to aggregate metrics, so when I think of network visibility, it's really around MELT data: metrics, events, logs, and traces. As part of our full-stack observability protocols and apparatus, we're able to track all of those types of event data and data points onto our dashboards. The dashboards are fully customizable, so we're able to actually, during our path visualization process, navigate the dashboards accordingly for our enterprise-wide deployments and access the dashboards according to roles.

ThousandEyes has provided my organization with invaluable network visibility and insights and incredible ease of use. There is a very narrow learning curve for new users in how to leverage the extensive features that ThousandEyes provides. ThousandEyes has become critical for swift network troubleshooting as well, so anytime that there's potential issues with applications or we want to be proactive in resolving potential issues before they arise, ThousandEyes is really the platform that we're leveraging for WAN monitoring, Wi-Fi, latency, packet loss, etc. ThousandEyes has become a very powerful tool in our toolkit.

ThousandEyes has saved my team on a week-to-week basis about 7 to 9% of our time spent on troubleshooting network and application visibility, availability, and performance. We are able to now allocate that time saved to other mission-critical activities and projects across the organization. ThousandEyes has become a really invaluable tool for not just identifying network issues, but also taking proactive steps in resolving those network issues. It's really been a huge relief in terms of not just time savings, but then also frustration and ease of troubleshooting tool to free up our DevSecOps  engineers to more mission-critical activities.

With ThousandEyes, there are some configuration and metric screens that are not entirely intuitive with ThousandEyes, so they can certainly improve in terms of the usability of certain metric screens. ThousandEyes can also offer deeper traffic insights relative to specific applications, so detailed analytics on application-level traffic would help in better understanding and managing our network resources effectively.

I would say that ThousandEyes can also, in terms of providing more extensibility with other observability tools, offer more out-of-the-box integrations with other observability tools so that ThousandEyes can serve as that single source of truth, so that we don't necessarily need to go to other tools to be able to be that one-source dashboard. I think there's a lot that ThousandEyes can continue to improve on there.

The issues that I've talked about, including extensibility with other platforms and the improvement of accessing specific metric screens in order to be able to provide for fuller access and more detailed access to network-level metrics would make the platform feel less complicated to navigate. It wouldn't require as many manual integration inputs.

I have been using ThousandEyes now at three companies, and here at Fruidist, I have been using ThousandEyes for a little over 14 months. At my previous two companies, I had been using ThousandEyes for cumulatively about two and a half years as well.

I would rate ThousandEyes a 9. I think that it has tremendous capabilities around granular data views and dashboard access. I just think that the issues that I've talked about, including some of the metric screens and extensibility across other platforms, can still be improved.

I would say that certainly do your research in terms of the extensibility of ThousandEyes across other observability providers as well. ThousandEyes is an incredibly powerful solution when it comes to network visibility and performance. To get a full scope of coverage across your technology layers, including the application layer and infrastructure layer, you will need to combine other best-in-class observability solutions for a fuller picture. I would certainly do your research in terms of which other providers work and integrate well with ThousandEyes for that full-stack view.

ThousandEyes is deployed via public cloud at our organization.

We are using Amazon Web Services  as our public cloud provider.

I did purchase ThousandEyes through the AWS Marketplace .

ThousandEyes pricing can also get more streamlined. Right now, ThousandEyes prices based on cloud and enterprise units, endpoint agents, insights, and implementation services, and I feel that the pricing model can certainly be streamlined.

ThousandEyes has been an incredible partner for network path visualization and full-stack visibility. I have now used ThousandEyes at this my third company utilizing ThousandEyes for network visibility, and the ease of use and learning curve are just incredible. I look forward to utilizing ThousandEyes going forward as well.

Positive

My main use case for ThousandEyes  is to keep an eye on vital enterprise tools, which are mostly cloud-hosted in the form of SaaS apps. It helps us provide visibility into our performance and availability and also figure out when issues occur and who is the responsible party. It is also used to monitor all our public-facing services hosted in our private data center.

A quick specific example of how we use ThousandEyes  in our day-to-day work is that we usually use it for observability purposes, monitoring and alerting, and identifying an issue before the customer does. We monitor nodes in the colocation facility around our location in the USA. The biggest problem that ThousandEyes addresses is being able to do off-net tests to compare our network with external networks. This allows us to create historical baselines and verify reachability for customers that may have issues getting to specific websites. Sometimes those issues are local, but ThousandEyes helps us verify if they are global or part of a larger issue.

ThousandEyes is deployed in my organization using a hybrid cloud model with AWS  as our cloud provider. We purchased ThousandEyes through the AWS Marketplace .

We use ThousandEyes in our day-to-day activities to try to fix problems quickly and ensure a smooth experience for our customers.

ThousandEyes offers the best features including global internet and cloud visibility from distributed vantage points, application and network performance monitoring, real-time outage detection and incident alerts, end-to-end path visualization for rapid troubleshooting, proactive issue demarcation, and historical data. It is easy to use, easy to set up, has a good support team with quick responses, features high-level customization for dashboards and testing, and provides seamless integration with Cisco products.

ThousandEyes has positively impacted my organization by reducing mean time to troubleshoot and resolve issues faster, as well as resulting in fewer user mapping error issues.

ThousandEyes can be improved by making the installation procedure less time-consuming and enhancing the interface to be more user-friendly. Better agent integration on Cisco routers would also be beneficial.

An improvement needed for ThousandEyes that we have not discussed yet would be a unified licensing for the endpoint agent.

I have been using ThousandEyes for four years.

ThousandEyes is fast, reliable, and very stable.

ThousandEyes's scalability is excellent; it is very scalable and grows with my organization's needs.

The customer support for ThousandEyes is very proactive and supportive.

I previously used a different solution called LogicMonitor  and Zabbix  before switching.

I have seen a return on investment by reducing troubleshooting time and having lesser user mapping error issues, in addition to engineering time saved through better observability and reduced organizational MTTR.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been that everything was cost-effective.

Before choosing ThousandEyes, I evaluated other options such as Atlassian and Confluence .

I would rate ThousandEyes an eight out of ten since it has improved visibility into our infrastructure, which is not under our control.

The advice I would give to others looking into using ThousandEyes is that it is a great tool for application and network performance troubleshooting, especially for understanding upstream SaaS networking pathing and performance. Nevertheless, it is not very appropriate for heavy synthetic application testing where variable consumption of compute units makes the solution cost unpredictable.