Cisco ThousandEyes vs. PingPlotter

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
PingPlotter
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
PingPlotter is a graphical traceroute and ping tool that visualizes network performance in a way that makes identifying the source of problems quicker and easier for everyone from online gamers and video streamers to VoIP admins and IT pros. Features for remote deployment, network monitoring, scripting, and a web interface are included along with several additional capabilities.
$0
per user
Pricing
Cisco ThousandEyesPingPlotter
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
PingPlotter Free
$0.00
per user
PingPlotter Free
$0.00
per user
PingPlotter Standard
$6.99
per user per month
PingPlotter Professional
$29.00
per user per month
PingPlotter Standard
$39.99
per user
PingPlotter Professional
$349.00
per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco ThousandEyesPingPlotter
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 ThousandEyesPingPlotter
Features
Cisco ThousandEyesPingPlotter
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Cisco ThousandEyes
-
Ratings
PingPlotter
8.2
Ratings
0% above category average
Automated network device discovery00 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Network monitoring00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Baseline threshold calculation00 Ratings6.90 Ratings
Alerts00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Customizable reports00 Ratings6.80 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco ThousandEyesPingPlotter
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
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Nexthink
Nexthink
Score 7.0 out of 10
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco ThousandEyesPingPlotter
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
6.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco ThousandEyesPingPlotter
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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The best scenario and best results are seen when the path does not reuse the same device for the "next hop". It is less well suited in situations where the path is being tricked by the re-use of devices for the next interface. This is seen required in many networks where the proper type of connection is not on an end device and the core device is used to provide a fiber to copper sort of "pass-through" connection.
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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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  • Monitor traffic in network
  • Measure stops when contacting network locations such as websites
  • Measures the lag and latency it takes to contact network locations
  • Gives you both induvidual measurements as well as good oversight
  • identifies when network lag or disconnect occurs
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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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  • Its a little confusing to see which targets are currently running pings and which ones are displayed in the plots.
  • Starting and stopping pings requires a right click and that would be better with a play/pause button I think.
  • Ability to drag and drop the graphs to reorder them.
  • more columns to show which targets are running and which are displayed. Currently this is done with symbols so you cant sort by just the running targets for example I've found.
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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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No answers on this topic
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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I installed it and it just started working. I realized I could then tweak it to show what I needed but didn't have to spend a long time configuring it before use, editing YAML files etc. Maybe that's fine for a network professional, but I only need this software if something goes wrong, and then need it to work quickly out of the box.
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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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I have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.
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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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PingPlotter has better visualizations and a stronger ability to capture historical data than other tools I've used. This makes it easier to find the root cause by looking back in the log data to find where latency or packet loss occurred.
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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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  • Great ROI, troubleshooting time has been reduced by 90%
  • Network Discoveries used to take 2 to 3 hours and were inconsistent - now it is a matter of minutes
  • lacks integration into our MSP toolkit, and we now use it as a stand alone product
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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.

PingPlotter Screenshots

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