Cisco ThousandEyes vs. SolarWinds ipMonitor

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco ThousandEyes
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.N/A
SolarWinds ipMonitor
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds ipMonitor is a lightweight performance monitoring tool. It enables monitoring from a single console and out-of-the-box visibility, with some automation available.
$1,570
installation
Pricing
Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
ipMonitor - 500 Monitors
$1570
installation
ipMonitor - 1000 Monitors
$2620
installation
ipMonitor -2500 Monitors
$5770
installation
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor
Features
Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Cisco ThousandEyes
-
Ratings
SolarWinds ipMonitor
6.7
Ratings
20% below category average
Automated network device discovery00 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Network monitoring00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Alerts00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Network mapping00 Ratings6.60 Ratings
Customizable reports00 Ratings4.20 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor
Small Businesses
SolarWinds Pingdom
SolarWinds Pingdom
Score 9.7 out of 10
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Catchpoint
Catchpoint
Score 9.2 out of 10
PingPlotter
PingPlotter
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Nexthink
Nexthink
Score 7.0 out of 10
PingPlotter
PingPlotter
Score 9.3 out of 10
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User Ratings
Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
6.4
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor
Likelihood to Recommend
As a service provider that is in multiple datacenters it's a great tool to use and leverage. Alot of smaller providers are only using NMS nodes that are hosted in their HQ or in spots that aren't where their content is hosted. Being able to run tests directly from your datacenters (between them or to the content provider itself) gives more accurate results. The downside is if you have no server infrastructure you'll have to install servers/machines to utilize it.
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SolarWinds ipMonitor is very easy to set-up and use, but can be quite slow to execute. Therefore, I don't think it will work in a medium-to-large organisation. Also, the interface is not suited for 100s of devices. The customisibility could also be better, so enterprises that require strict branding rules need to look elsewhere.
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Pros
  • Agent to Agent testing. Full round trip test. Have a customer using a Server Side API that is having an issue. Loan a Nuc, or have them install the ThousandEyes agent in their network. You'll find the issue guaranteed.
  • Device Layer vision - ability to see from the server, through the Firewall, switches Proxy and internet. Measure jitter, latency, response time, load time and see the path your packet takes.
  • Share your tests live. Provide the customer a link to a live test, they can see what you do, review your metrics and verify your tests. They can also use it as a tool to better their service. Build the trust and stickiness with your customers' most difficult users - the IT Operations team.
  • Validate your QOS and routes for VOIP, video conferences, and data traffic. Highly flexible and configurable complete with transaction-based testing, custom headers, calls and tools to mimic any scenario you need.
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  • Both network devices and servers may be easily located on the network.
  • It notifies the user whenever any network device undergoes a change in status.
  • Powerful reporting capabilities that provide vital data about your network's devices (uptime, space, utilization of resources on your devices)
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Cons
  • We have the product, we have a fair amount of wireless issues. You have to go through so many hoops, links and selections that I would think would've been impossible. Maybe if you have a specialized engineer, you would be able to use the thousandeyes product to troubleshoot a problem. But if I want to share with our knock, for example, would be very challenging because there is so many paths that you have to go and there is so many assumptions you have to do to actually find the root cause of the problem. What I would expect is maybe what they can do is implementing some AI today on this product to give some hints, "hey, this might be the problem because the data is there but it's difficult to find." We need an easier way to find how we can use the platform to point out where's the root cause of those problems.
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  • It is a very complete and versatile software, but its price can be somewhat high for small companies.
  • During the analysis of the collected data the process can be somewhat slow, so it takes more time than expected.
  • Its configuration process can be somewhat complex since it requires several configurations so having prior knowledge is helpful.
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Likelihood to Renew
We will definitely renew and maybe even extend our usage of ThousandEyes. We have been using ThousandEyes now for a couple of years and it has shown us major benefits. With the new options it offers for SD-WAN for us it is a no brainer to renew our current licenses
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I have very few pieces of software, that are specific to IT and IT services, that just work. Honestly, I don't need the support as it never breaks, but I believe in rewarding vendors that make valuable products
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Usability
There is definitely a learning curve to ThousandEyes, but once you understand how the client deployment works and how to set up monitoring, things go pretty smoothly. I think the initial setting up of clients on endpoints can be a little tricky though.
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Although SolarWinds ipMonitor is great tool to start the SaaS based monitoring journey with SolarWinds products but it still requires a lot of enhancement and its user base which is primarily using on-premises products of SolarWinds needs to be shifted on SaaS based platform strategically and need to motivate. ipMonitor needs to be interated with infra monitoring products such as On-Premises NAM bundle, SAM, DPA etc
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Reliability and Availability
Being cloud hosted means that you are at the mercy of Cisco web services, but we've had absolutely no issues with its availability.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
The client is very lightweight on endpoints and the user interface is very fast and fluid.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
You have online support from the tool itself 24/7 and they are very responsive. We also have a specific account manager and specific engineer assigned to help us with very specific questions for our environment. The level of response to our requirements is always super high. We have requested specific features to be added and these have been developed and introduced very quick tot he product (within weeks). Their DevOps and agile approach seems to pay off.
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Overall experience with SolarWinds support team is good. We never faced any delays or issues with the support team, they are knowledgeable or at least documentation is available to them I guess . Direct phone support is also nice and better than opening a support ticket in the system. Sometimes logs analysis take a lot of time and it seems support team is buying some time to fix the issue or to do more research on the issues but that is fine.
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In-Person Training
Our Cisco reps actually had someone teach us a few things about the functionality of ThousandEyes, and it helped a lot. The training was good and we had follow-up assistance as well when we had questions about the monitoring and reporting functions. Overall, we were satisfied with the training and support.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Our implementation was pretty straightforward, with some issues loading clients on endpoints. We didn't have any notable issues, and I don't really have any additional insights.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
It is a similar product to Cisco ThousandEyes. Both solutions give good network monitoring and traffic analysis. But Cisco ThousandEyes works better with Cisco devices and has real-time alerts that are very useful. It also helps to see network problems faster and make troubleshooting easier. Cisco ThousandEyes is also better for checking SaaS and cloud apps like Azure, AWS, Webex, etc. It has endpoint agents that show network quality directly from user devices. The web interface is simple to use, so the learning curve is not too steep. Also, it has many monitoring points around the world, making it easy to check performance outside the company network.
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The way SolarWinds has clubbed the features and capabilities in SolarWinds ipMonitor is not available in other 3rd party or native tools. Even if they are available then they are very costly. I think SolarWinds is positioning ipMonitor so as to test their footprint on SaaS world with these small scale monitoring tools such as Loggly, ipmonitor, AppOptics which is a good sign to enter the SaaS based monitoring solution.
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Scalability
I think this product would be infinitely scalable since it's all cloud hosted and can support thousands of endpoints if needed. We are only using it for a limited number of endpoints, so we never really considered scalability.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • ThousandEyes has helped us quickly isolate issues on some high-profile (within the organization) incidents and whether the network (internally or on the Internet) is at fault. If it is, it becomes easier to see the "where" of the issues quicker so we can move onto what the issue is faster. In the case of non-network related issues, it helps us get the appropriate teams or individuals involved sooner.
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  • Cost was much higher than the services
  • ipMonitor was well suited but the costing factor wasn't justified as there are tons of open-source tools available in the market with more functionalities
  • Alerts response was very good and ipMonitor served well with health checks.
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ScreenShots

Cisco ThousandEyes Screenshots

Screenshot of global availability issues for users trying to use Slack application.Screenshot of the path visibility feature pinpointing where in the transit path an outage or event is occurring.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Internet Insights™, which combines a massive data set with algorithmic outage detection to provide near real-time insights into a business's SaaS applications.  and networks. Internet Insights can be used to manage digital experience at Internet scale.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Event Detection diagnosing events as server or network issue.

SolarWinds ipMonitor Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Easy to navigate GUI interfaceScreenshot of Remediation FunctionalityScreenshot of Network Discovery Wizard