Cisco ThousandEyes is a Digital Experience Assurance platform that helps organizations to deliver flawless digital experiences across every network – even the ones they don’t own.
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SolarWinds NPM
Score 8.5 out of 10
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SolarWinds NPM is a monitoring and performance management platform. It provides performance troubleshooting support, auto network discovery, customizable thresholds, and can be rapidly deployed.
Juniper RPM offers device config level sla testing in the service stream layer. Whilst this is good and is monitorable via snmp, the config can be fiddly and needs a Juniper device at the other end as a reply point
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 …
One of the biggest differences is the ability to use an enterprise-agent. This is huge because not all web applications are available on the internet. There are a number of internal-only applications that we need to collect data on and monitor availability. Being able to test …
ThousandEyes provides end to end path visibility from end users all the way to the applications from remote locations through the WAN to the Cloud. No other platforms provides such visibility to identify issues that impact end user experience.
To be honest for our use we utilize both PRTG as well as ThousandEyes for different and unique purposes. ThousandEyes could do everything however it does become a bit cost-prohibitive. We were able to gain access to ThousandEyes from our Cisco licensing on other products and …
A thousand eyes offer more insight into the internet compared to other products. It has really good network performance monitoring and network mapping capabilities. Alerting and reports are much better and the dashboard visual is great. Customer service is very very responsive.
SolarWinds gives a more holistic view of your environment. The price was on par for value received and the usability was a little easier with SolarWinds than the other tools. The reporting out of SolarWinds was a little easier to grasp for us, as well. Overall, it's a great tool.
SolarWinds NPM is a good entry tool for smaller companies as it provides you a decent baseline to monitor your network. To unlock the full potential you need to add agents and it falls pretty quick. It is not as good as enterprise tools like ExtraHop. Also it is not as easy to …
As a service provider that is in multiple datacenters it's a great tool to use and leverage. Alot of smaller providers are only using NMS nodes that are hosted in their HQ or in spots that aren't where their content is hosted. Being able to run tests directly from your datacenters (between them or to the content provider itself) gives more accurate results. The downside is if you have no server infrastructure you'll have to install servers/machines to utilize it.
Solarwinds NPM is well suited for medium to large networks, it may be a bit heavy for the SOHO environment as most of the tools and reports are designed for monitoring KPIs which may not be critical for a small shop. NPM can handle large networks with several sites and mixed technologies ranging from networks, server systems, storage devices and SLA reporting.
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.
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.
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
The entire IT staff relies on NPM in its daily operations. It would be impossible for us to maintain our level of service without it. If SolarWinds gets to proud of their product and begins to over charge for it, we would be forced to reconsider and use a different product. But as it stands it is worth the price to renew it.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is quite an extensive product, covering all our bases and requirements. There are a lot of customizable options and features which you can work with for their alerting which is really useful. I haven't found anything yet which I thought SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) could do, but it actually couldn't so overall it works nicely and does the job.
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.
In all of the times that we called support, someone at SolarWinds had the answer for us in a timely manner. Through thwack and other internet searching, we have been able to resolve all of our issues that arose to our satisfaction. The support staff have always been knowledgeable of their products or had a fellow support staff member to rely on to get the needed answers.
The training is good but during the implementation, you can get situations not learned during the training. The trainer was very open to hearing the questions about use cases and always sharing his experience. I really recommend having official training to take advantage of all features that the NPM can bring.
Make sure your inventory is accurate. Stand up some virtual machines for testing prior to installation. Make sure your database and its credentials are setup. Think about things you want to monitor that may not be obvious - UPS units, Door hardware, PBX systems, Fabric Channel switches, firewalls, routers, switches. Try to setup SNMP on these devices and have an IP that you will assign to the new server. If you do that it will go well.
Juniper RPM offers device config level sla testing in the service stream layer. Whilst this is good and is monitorable via snmp, the config can be fiddly and needs a Juniper device at the other end as a reply point
We selected SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor because of the capabilities of the product versus the price. The tools also work well with their other products and support is fairly good. We have never had a problem when we needed to make a call.
It's not about the ROI would be measured by "hey, how we can reduce that outage." That's a mission to you. That's our goal. That's when we brought this. Are we using this a lot? We use primarily, we use the thousandeyes three or four times a year when we have problems that are related. So it doesn't yield much value to us to be honest, but it's good because it can point out, but it's not even that much value to be honest.
SolarWinds allows us to proactively address hardware issues before they impact the business. We recently had a server that was experiencing issues sporadically and we were able to use the data from SolarWinds to track down and correct the issue before it tanked the server.
SolarWinds gives our IT department some piece of mind knowing that they'll be alerted of any issues real time.
We can use SolarWinds data to justify needed to replace or upgrade certain equipment that is key to our core business.
