Cisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.
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Glassbox
Score 7.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Glassbox helps organizations make their customer’s digital experience intuitive and safe. It does this by capturing activity on mobile apps and websites and visualizing a holistic journey map. Using embedded AI Glassbox points to where CX is being compromised, the reasons behind it, and their potential value and empowers users to take action in real-time.
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.
I’ve found that Glassbox is particularly well-suited during marketing campaigns, because you can export and analyze data in real-time, track the campaign’s effectiveness, and gain immediate insight into how customers are interacting with your website. With these insights, we’re able to tweak campaigns on the fly to increase engagement and conversion rates. Similarly, since Glassbox allows us to monitor customer interactions in real-time, we gain immediate feedback on how our users are engaging with a new digital feature on our platform, for example. We can then quickly identify any usability issues or friction points, make adjustments in real-time to improve the user experience, and maximize the success of the new feature.
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.
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.
It's a pretty powerful platform, and my sense is that most users don't utilize it to its fullest potential. Glassbox could help by offering a more comprehensive onboarding program (maybe even customized training sessions or live workshops tailored to the needs and use cases of FSIs)
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.
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.
Glassbox is very easy to use, and with the AI features which it has inside, it has been very easy for us to not only find the relevant sessions but also summarize them and interact with the summary - so we now have all types of people in our org who use Glassbox - including those who are purely non-tech. Also, I must give a huge shoutout to our customer support team who have been instrumental in helping us get value from Glassbox
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.
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.
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.
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.
Glassbox is a customer experience management platform that provides various tools to help organizations understand and improve the customer journey. There may be other products that offer similar capabilities, such as FullStory, UserTesting, and Clicktale. These products may provide similar features, such as session replay, advanced analytics, and integration with other tools. It is important for organizations to carefully evaluate the specific needs and goals of their business and choose a product that aligns with those objectives.
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.
Glassbox has really taken us to the next level in terms of customer sentiment analysis and informed decision-making. We're capturing 100% of customer sessions, and with Glassbox we're able to address hidden issues and make decisions that enhance the experience of our entire customer base, as opposed to just a select few. Our strategic decisions are now based on accurate, comprehensive data, and we're seeing the fruits of this. Our customers are more engaged (and more loyal), our conversion rates are climbing, and our business is growing.
