Likelihood to Recommend It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.
Read full review At least for me, it is a very important tool to diagnose bandwidth / Routing issues. Any global company should have ThousandEyes, it will avoid you many headaches. You'll need to invest in servers (on-prem and remote) in all locations in which you need, you can take advantage of all the monitoring tools.
Read full review Pros ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.). Change orders. Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders. Read full review Alerting on outages. ThousandEyes provides a few different options to receive alerts: you can have alerts emailed to a subset of (or all) users, there is a basic Slack integration, and if more flexibility is required (or your preferred method of being alerted isn't built-in) webhooks can be used to hit another API. Speeding up mean time to resolution (or mean time to innocence if you're a more siloed and blame-happy organization). Failure alerts can be configured to include the cause of the failure instead of just "resource x is down." For example, the alerts can come out and say that a website was down due to an HTTP 500, which will help prevent staff from spinning their wheels trying to diagnose the network from the client to the web server. Post mortems and root cause analyses. After an outage has been resolved, it is possible to go back for up to 30 days without losing any level of detail for the test in question, and to view information like the DNS response received, the network path taken by the traffic, and any added latency incurred by an individual link. It can also be used to view Internet routing changes surrounding the incident. Support. Every ticket or chat I have opened has been met by a friendly and helpful staff member that has been able to provide helpful insight into what is causing a particular issue, and what steps they will take on their side to resolve an issue or provide suggestions of steps to take on our side if necessary. Read full review Cons The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind. It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly. It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed. Read full review Continue to innovate and support more and more services. In the world of IOT and point to point traffic being more and more prevalent creating a flexible product is fantastic. Build on the end user product, last mile and even more sharing. Read full review 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
Read full review Usability I'm happy with the monitoring part, now if you want to know the benefits cost related and usability I'm not the person who can answer that.
Read full review Support Rating We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to
ServiceNow . The user interface on
ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With
ServiceNow , the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.
Read full review Simple Network Management Protocol cannot achieve what an agent-based monitoring solution can. Access layer testing gives you visibility into the user's endpoint. ThousandEyes is able to provide both telemetry and user experience in a bundled solution. The way that Cisco has built in the enterprise agents to their 9300 and 9500 switches has made exposure to the platform widespread.
Read full review Return on Investment It helped make us an ITIL shop. It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues. Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk. Read full review Real time visibility about network health can prepare us for outages Less time wasted troubleshooting end user network issues when ThousandEyes can give clarity which saves time doing extra work Before doing business with a SaaS product we can use ThousandEyes to give historical datat on network uptime. Read full review ScreenShots Cisco ThousandEyes Screenshots