TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Cisco ThousandEyes vs. SolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco ThousandEyes

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/ACisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.N/A

    SolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)

    Score6.9 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds ipMonitor was a lightweight performance monitoring tool that enabled monitoring from a single console and out-of-the-box visibility, with some automation available. The product is discontinued, and no longer available for sale.

    $1,570

    installation

    Pricing
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    ipMonitor - 500 Monitors
    $1570
    installation
    ipMonitor - 1000 Monitors
    $2620
    installation
    ipMonitor -2500 Monitors
    $5770
    installation
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    118 Answers
    73%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    90%
    Delivers good value for the price
    9 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    119 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    11 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89 Answers
    91%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    10 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    88%
    Implementation went as expected
    92 Answers
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    Features
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    Network Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Cisco ThousandEyes and SolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    SolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    6.7
    24 Ratings
    17% below category average
    Automated network device discovery00 Ratings6.710 Ratings
    Network monitoring00 Ratings8.024 Ratings
    Alerts00 Ratings8.223 Ratings
    Network mapping00 Ratings6.619 Ratings
    Customizable reports00 Ratings4.223 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Auvik
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Catchpoint
    Score8.5 out of 10
    PingPlotter
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Nexthink
    Score7.3 out of 10
    Nmap
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (126 ratings)
    9.0
    (24 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.6
    (6 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    8.2
    (6 ratings)
    Availability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.7
    (6 ratings)
    8.8
    (7 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    SolarWinds ipMonitor is well suited in situation where customer do not wants to hold the responsibility of underlying monitoring infrastructure management such as Servers, Database, website and their high availability. And of course when you need Network, Servers, Services fault and performance monitoring. When you have specialized network monitoring requirement such as Configuration backup, netflow traffic analysis then this is not the right tool.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Both network devices and servers may be easily located on the network.
    • It notifies the user whenever any network device undergoes a change in status.
    • Powerful reporting capabilities that provide vital data about your network's devices (uptime, space, utilization of resources on your devices)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • It is a very complete and versatile software, but its price can be somewhat high for small companies.
    • During the analysis of the collected data the process can be somewhat slow, so it takes more time than expected.
    • Its configuration process can be somewhat complex since it requires several configurations so having prior knowledge is helpful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    I have very few pieces of software, that are specific to IT and IT services, that just work. Honestly, I don't need the support as it never breaks, but I believe in rewarding vendors that make valuable products
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    SolarWinds ipMonitor is a perfectly decent network mapper and performance metric gatherer, but it is held back by the UI, which can be hard to navigate once you have more than a couple dozen assets in there. It is fairly priced, but it also sometimes takes a really long time before results come in.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    Being cloud hosted means that you are at the mercy of Cisco web services, but we've had absolutely no issues with its availability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Cisco
    The client is very lightweight on endpoints and the user interface is very fast and fluid.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    Although I had not much support ticket with ipMonitor support team but I can share my overall experience with SolarWinds products and support team. I am working with SolarWinds support team since last 7 years and in last 2-3 years I have seen a significant improvement in knowledge documentation which is helping end users to troubleshoot problems by themselves. Apart from this SolarWinds phone call based support is very nice as tickets and emails might take some time but a direct phone call can get your job done quickly comparatively.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    We were trying to evaluate different providers and ipMonitor suited us because we had on-prem and cloud instances and management decided to check the paid tool. The ipMonitor is a very responsive tool and it served the purpose well but as IT is evolving and needs are changing, we discontinued the ipMonitor and shifted to Zabbix due to the customization which was the need at the time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Cisco
    The contract was fair and rolled up into some of our other contracts, so it was no big deal getting it up and running.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    Cisco
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • We currently use an outside service to monitor critical network nodes. We will do away with that service shortly.
    • We no longer have to wait to hear from our users if there is a network device down. We will be proactively alerted and we can begin to remediate immediately helping to limit downtime.
    • After initial setup and some tweaking, it requires little to no time to maintain.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.

    SolarWinds ipMonitor (discontinued) Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotScreenshot of Easy to navigate GUI interfaceScreenshot of Remediation FunctionalityScreenshot of Network Discovery Wizard