Item: Cisco ThousandEyes
Rating: 10
Author: Manuel Ayala

Overall Satisfaction with ThousandEyes

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used widely by the internal Telecom Support team for all sites (900+) and regions in the company. Is used mainly in two ways:

Proactive identification of incidents.
T-shooting active incidents.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Good synthetic monitoring capabilities.
Test multiple protocols and network ports emulating as close as possible the behaviors of real applications in production environments.
The number of possible tests and reports are very good.
API integration is very good to integrate with analytics.

Cons

The EndPoint agent (client installed on the user's PC) has very limited functionality, mostly only to monitor web (HTTP/HTTPS) transactions.
Synthetic monitoring only emulates connections to the respective server or other ThousandEyes agents. It does NOT emulate actual end-user transactions.

Return on Investment

Much faster t-shooting on active incidents.
Has helped with overall network performance and capacity analysis beyond incidents.
Leadership and customer visibility to network performance.

The cost-benefit rate is good in ThousandEyes compared to some other applications.

ThousandEyes is very oriented to network performance: hop-by-hop network analysis, latency, jitter, packet loss, MOS, QoS mismatch identification, etc. Other applications are more oriented to app performance and the network analysis might not be as deep as with ThousandEyes. They are good in their own area though.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco ThousandEyes delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco ThousandEyes's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco ThousandEyes live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco ThousandEyes go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco ThousandEyes again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Good scenarios: Mainly used to measure network performance, not applications. Very strong with visual reports that aim to easily find pinpoint issues or simply abnormal behaviors to keep an eye on. Standard alerting capabilities and integration with other tools through KPIs. The new integration allows it to be deployed on Cisco 9K switches. Good to monitor Intranet and access to your applications from the Internet.

Bad scenarios: Not good to do deep-dive analysis on application performance (although it can do some basics on web transactions). It only does synthetic monitoring (emulates user transactions sending/receiving its own packets), doesn't analyze real user/server network packets or transactions (packet analysis). At the time of this review, it doesn't include specific wireless network monitoring capabilities.

Cisco ThousandEyes Feature Ratings

Cisco Hybrid Work

ThousandEyes Support

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.

Comments

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Great value for cost on network monitoring