BeyondTrust Remote Support (formerly Bomgar) helps support teams of all sizes improve business performance by enabling secure, controlled remote support to nearly any device or system, anywhere in the world. BeyondTrust offers deployment options that can fit a company’s business needs. The vendor says their on-premises physical and virtual appliances have helped enterprises satisfy regulatory requirements for years. Additionally, the vendor says the unique segmentation capabilities of…
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Cisco ThousandEyes
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Cisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.
In our line of work, the ability to provide a seamless and fast forward approach to support is important. It reflects positively on our support staff and teams when we can resolve issues quickly and effectively whether that's on servers, workstations, mobile devices etc. We have found the software to not be as beneficial on Linux Servers.
Unified communications real-time analysis is one of the biggest points of the solution. You can see your traffic path and find issues before, during and after the calls. This is very useful for analyzing VoIP and video conferencing problems like in WebEx, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. It helps to see network issues like packet loss, jitter, or latency that can make call quality bad. Another good use case is checking cloud apps and SaaS services. Many companies use external platforms like Microsoft Azure, 365, Salesforce, or AWS. It lets Networking teams see the network path from users to these services so they can find if problems come from the company network, the internet provider, or the cloud service. Also, it is good for companies using mix of on-prem and cloud. It shows how traffic moves between different parts of the network, so IT teams can see where a problem happens and fix it faster. There are different types of agents that we can use in Cisco ThousandEyes. Enterprise agents can be use for a relative big amount of synthetic test. Endpoint agents are install in user PC or MAC laptops to check network quality from the client side. WebEx devices also have built-in agents that help to see performance problems in meetings, making it easy to find what is causing a bad call. Maybe it's not the best solution if what you want to measure is not HTTPs based or hasn't an API. Also if your scenario is Zoom Rooms, you won't have the same level of integration that it has for WebEx and Microsoft solutions.
Remote access for macOS computers. We support primarily businesses that use Macs and good macOS support is very important.
Maintains logs and screen sharing videos of all sessions. It's peace of mind for us and also helps meet compliance standards that we can tell exactly what happened, every time we access a machine remotely.
Allows for easy management of hundreds of computers in a single app. We support hundreds of computers for dozens of companies. Finding the right computer to access is very easy and able to be done with just a few clicks.
Cisco ThousandEyes does the holistic discovery of the end components, the network components, and it's really fast at identifying where the issue is, which is not normally identified by the classic monitoring tools. So it's quite a fast identifying the issue of the networks and Cisco ThousandEyes also provides a very good real user end user monitoring experience for the end customers. So those are the two real life and also very good examples for Cisco ThousandEyes.
Only issue I really have is the jump client goes to queu when our remote vendors shut down their machine. Works in our favor if we lose our connection but that never happens. And this is such a small issue but had to put something in here.
The elephant in the room is going to be cost. ThousandEyes is a great tool, but you will pay for it. There are other services that do a good job at providing a smaller subset of features compared to ThousandEyes. If all you need is that particular subset of features, ThousandEyes may not make fiscal sense for your organization.
As a subset of the cost issue, within the last 18 months or so the pricing on enterprise (local) agents has been modified in a way that seems not to benefit the customer. Previously enterprise agents had a flat monthly cost associated with them with unlimited test usage (the only limit on test usage was based on concurrent tests running at any given point in time). This meant that instead of using a cloud agent and paying per-test, you had the option of spinning up an cheap Digital Ocean droplet and creating your own cloud agent for external testing without using Cloud Agents. When the change was made they eliminated the flat per-agent cost and instead treated the pricing the same as that of the cloud agents but cutting the number of "cloud units" per test in half for tests run from enterprise agents. For organizations with under-utilized enterprise agents, this may be helpful financially, but for organizations that push their local agents to the limit, the cost skyrocketed.
BGP monitor peering sessions have been less than reliable. The data doesn't seem to be an issue, but the sessions seem to bounce or fail altogether on a fairly consistent basis. The routers or servers with which your routers peer sit behind some firewalls that have caused issues in the past.
Bomgar has improved the support we have given as an ICT department and improved the ICT department reputation within the organisation. We have had no issues with Bomgar as a product and it works well. The team at Bomgar are also a pleasure to work with, they follow up with us to see how they can help us use more of the features of the system and really take time to get to know their users and how they use the product.
The software does it's job extremely well and the system makes it very user friendly to get into. When looking for software I prefer to not need a PHD to operate it. Having a great UI and simple setup makes it easy to include more members of our team to get more value out of the platform.
RemoteSupport has the most modern-looking interface I have seen. Its number of features, both nice to have and necessary, is better than any other competing solution on the market. They also prioritize security, so you can be confident that only the people you want accessing a given endpoint have access because their security can be configured to be role-based or as granular as you want.
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.
As far as uptime is concerned, Since Bomgar creates the Hardware and Software, they can make it the most reliable box in our datacenter, and they also have options for availability and redundancy that we didn't need to utilize, we have a manual fail-over process that we can invoke, but there are configurations that would allow for an automated failover as well.
There is no lag-time at all, no matter how many users we have on the box, it is always entirely dependant on the customers internet speed (as we have a very fast connection), that is the only issue I've EVER seen with Bomgar, no matter how many sessions we run the box is always up, always fast, always working.
The support team at Bomgar always goes beyond the call of duty. No question seems to little or big for them to handle. They are there with you from the time you initiate a session or call with them until there is a resolution. You get awesome service. Their reps are always friendly and knowledgeable
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.
we didn't have in-person training because their online training was so overwhelmingly well done. Start by looking at the docs: http://www.bomgar.com/docs/content/index.htm if that alone doesn't answer all your questions, there will be a window that pops up asking if you would like to chat with a sales representative, or a support engineer. Either of them can answer all of your questions as easily as if they were standing there with you, or talking to you on the phone, it is truly the power of Bomgar!
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.
Since we have installed and been running Bomgar software for quite some time now, we have taken the opportunity to attend various web trainings, and they are always very prompt, informative and open to questions/discussions. We appreciate the work that Bomgar does to keep their customer community informed of new features and discussions of further product developments.
It was easy to get going. You have to pick your features to enable disable and then configure any customizations for the enabled features. It could not be easier to get started. The number of options can be a bit overwhelming at first
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.
When we used Webex our customers often had issues because staff in medical offices don't always have easy access to browse the internet. We could send them an invitation but we would often go round and round with them. With BeyondTrust Remote [Support (Legacy)] we don't have that problem as it allows easy access for these customers.
No one is better than the other. I can get different data and sometimes similar data, it's important to compare values and verify the data between the tools. Additionally, there are other functionalities that ThousandEyes has that the others don't, but it is also the other way around. I will always recommend to have available not 1 or 2, all possible available for your job.
Since the Bomgar Box is BOTH hardware and software, it can be purchased in any capacity deemed necessary, so scalability isn't an issue, Bomgar has the experience necessary to create a design that can support as many customer and agent sessions as you can throw at it. We have never had any issues with the Bomgar box and licenses that we have installed.
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.
Building the trust from our Merchants is core when you come to renewal time. Trust builds partnerships, builds stickiness and allows for easier upsells or contract renewals.
Having a champion in IT that touts your service is important to the business, it removes a large portion of friction in the business to get services implemented and working to its peak.
Flexibility in pricing can be better. How they measure the number of agents being used can get thorny. When you build and tear down virtual servers a lot it can appear there are more agents running than there are. Once we understood how they measure we were able to better utilize the product efficiently.
