Cisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.
N/A
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
NETSCOUT’s nGeniousONE is a platform designed to monitor enterprise-level networks. It includes standard monitoring capabilities, as well as advanced inspection and analytics features.
It is a similar product to Cisco ThousandEyes. Both solutions give good network monitoring and traffic analysis. But Cisco ThousandEyes works better with Cisco devices and has real-time alerts that are very useful. It also helps to see network problems faster and make …
SolarWinds provides better modularity, improving your ROI by paying only for what you need as opposed to paying for the entire suite whether you need it or not. It also seems to be much more intuitive. However, I'm not sure that it provides packet capturing functionality for …
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.
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is a great network performance monitoring tool as it helps to trace the path of packet and to identify the exact place where the packet is loss. It is well suited in scenarios where the organization have large network and they need continuous monitoring because loss of connectivity may lead to serious financial loss in sectors like banking, hospitals. The network performance and connectivity needs to be stable for proper execution of transactions, bookings, data transfer and other critical task. Performance monitoring of large enterprise is a big task and doing that manually requires very much effort, but with NETSCOUT nGeniusONE it becomes easy. It is not well suited in scenarios where there is small network and they can survive if any link flaps for small duration of time.
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.
NetScout nGeniusONE can help to deep dive into the packet layer, help to identify the real network and service performance problems in the protocol layer. We have been using NetScout nGeniusONE as the main monitoring solution for the mobile network for many years.
I have recently use NetScout nGeniusONE to support problem troubleshooting for a customer issue complaining of slow application connection into our Datacenter services. it was easy to use NetScout nGeniusONE to capture the problematic connection sessions by using various type of filters and export a pcap file for further analysis.
I‘ve also use NetScout nGeniusONE to investigate an NBN connection issue which was intermittent and hard to capture, however, by using NetScout nGeniusONE it was easy to go back to the history capture and logs, so we won't miss any important leads.
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.
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
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.
Requires quite a bit of training not only for config but to use. Highly recommend having a SME come in from Netscout to help initially for these. Once you learn the UI, it’s much better to use but is not intuitive.
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.
If you spend the right amount of money with them they work very close to you to support your needs. I ignore how they work in companies with lower expenses on their products. NetScout is not a very dynamic introducing platform with enhancements that their customers need. We contract their professional services so support level is good, although too pricey from my perspective.
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.
Kentik Synthetics is a newer competitor of Cisco ThousandEyes. Both do very similar things but Cisco ThousandEyes currently is the more mature platform. However, the pricing of Synthetics is very attractive. It does not have the robustness of Cisco ThousandEyes or the off-net test leveraging (# of outside companies partnered with them) but has made many improvements in the past 2 years.
Wireshark has been around for years and has been used primarily for packet analyzing. NetScout does this and goes above and beyond with the graphics interface analyzes and customer filtering for packet analyzes. You can go straight to the packet analyze within NetScout but you will find that to be more work, this would be like starting with Wireshark. Instead, begin with the graphical interface to narrow down the traffic, a visual effect. Then go to the packet analyzer, time saver. As for PRTG, it's a NetFlow/SNMP collector with a quick and dirty look at traffic but lacks the tools to dig into the information it provides.
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.
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is the best tool and very profitable for our organization as it helped in to reduce the manual effort of engineers to track the Network flaps and connectivity issue.
Return on investment for this product is quiet good as of now and we have achieved 80% ROI till now and we are very much confident that we will achieve the full ROI.
It has helped in cost cutting as we need only few network admin and engineers to track the discovery, behavior and connectivity. Earlier we need a lot of employee to do that due to which the organization may suffer some financial loss.
