TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Cisco ThousandEyes vs. SolarWinds Pingdom vs. Retrace (legacy)

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 Pingdom

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.

    $14.95

    per month

    Retrace (legacy)

    Score8 out of 10
    N/AStackify Retrace provides application performance management across the entire stack. Coupled with aggregated logs from common logging frameworks, find every exception in code. Retrace code with lightweight code profiling and track and monitor all key application and server metrics. The vendor states that with coverage for full lifecycle development, the Stackify Retrace software offering is tailored to be inclusive for multiple role types, and presents everything your team needs to know about…

    $99

    up to 3 servers, 500,000 traces, and 1,000,000 logs

    Pricing
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds PingdomRetrace (legacy)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Synthetic Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Real User Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Enterprise
    Custom Pricing
    Essentials
    $99
    up to 3 servers, 500,000 traces, and 1,000,000 logs
    Standard
    249+
    2,000,000+ traces and 5,000,000+ logs
    Enterprise
    Custom
    Customer number of traces and logs
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds PingdomRetrace (legacy)
    Free Trial
    YesYesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsPricing is based on trace and log usage.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds PingdomRetrace (legacy)
    Considered Multiple Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
    We have found ThousandEyes to be more full-featured than many of its competitors. Many of them were more tailored strictly for operating inside a corporate network and weren't flexible enough to adapt to our service provider use case. Other competitors, simply didn't have the …
    Incentivized
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds Pingdom
    Pingdom was cheaper with better reporting and API integration.
    Incentivized
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    118 Answers
    98%
    Would buy again
    52 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    52 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    119 Answers
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    52 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89 Answers
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    43 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    88%
    Implementation went as expected
    92 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    49 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds PingdomRetrace (legacy)
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Cisco ThousandEyes and SolarWinds Pingdom and Retrace (legacy)
    Feature
    Cisco ThousandEyes
    -
    Ratings
    SolarWinds Pingdom
    -
    Ratings
    Retrace (legacy)
    6.4
    1 Ratings
    20% below category average
    Application monitoring00 Ratings00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
    Database monitoring00 Ratings00 Ratings6.01 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings00 Ratings6.01 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings00 Ratings6.01 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds PingdomRetrace (legacy)
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Catchpoint
    Score8.5 out of 10
    SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM)
    Score8 out of 10
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score7.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Nexthink
    Score7.3 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds PingdomRetrace (legacy)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (126 ratings)
    4.5
    (64 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.5
    (6 ratings)
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    8.5
    (7 ratings)
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.7
    (6 ratings)
    4.1
    (54 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ThousandEyesSolarWinds PingdomRetrace (legacy)
    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
    SolarWinds
    I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    If I need to change a logo design on the invoice, the new logo is slightly larger or smaller so the type below the logo is in a different area than before. In this case, you would need to load the new version of the document into APM Plus and redo the mapping of the field areas to properly grab the information needed to process the document. Without doing this, the document could fail or go to the wrong archive based on the fields.
    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
    SolarWinds
    • The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
    • The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
    • Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Integration of performance management with log management so you get the parameters sent
    • In-line log and error data in trace
    • Integration of error and log data, so in one click you can see all the logs recorded when an error was thrown
    • Very reasonably priced
    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
    SolarWinds
    • The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • To set up the fields that APM Plus monitors, you need to map each field area on each document.
    • APM Plus could use a way to link the documents back into the finance or business software so you can find the document under the PO, Sales Order, Invoice, etc.
    • APM Plus setup is only for the professionals. There are many areas that need tweaking on setup, having a better default setup would lessen the learning curve to set it up for use.
    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
    SolarWinds
    Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    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
    SolarWinds
    Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    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
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    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
    SolarWinds
    Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.
    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
    SolarWinds
    Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    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
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    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
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    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
    SolarWinds
    1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
    2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    It is a very impressive tool which doesn't overwhelm you with unnecessary data. They have combination of tools that haven't seen by any other company which makes it a very powerful tool
    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
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    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
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    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
    SolarWinds
    • Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
    • In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
    • Its time to explore other alternatives.
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • APM Plus has freed up users from having to manually attach documents to each place they are sending it. APM Plus will do it automatically.
    • APM Plus provides a searchable archive to re-visit sent documents with customers and vendors. Having to reprint a document you risk the potential that something has changed since it was last printed.
    • APM Plus does need IT staff for adjustments and to review sending problems. Not for an average user.
    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 Pingdom Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    Retrace (legacy) Screenshots

    Screenshot of Detailed stack trace with inline error and logsScreenshot of Web Apps Dashboard:
The Apps Page gives you a high-level overview of all applications found and monitored across all servers in each environment. Click on any app to take you to the App Dashboard to view more information for a particular app.Screenshot of Apps Dashboard:
The App Dashboard is a powerful monitoring and troubleshooting perspective that gives you a view of application health across one or more environments.Screenshot of Performance (APM+) Dashboard:
The Performance section will give you a report of how well the application is performing overall, as perceived by your users.  A graph will allow you to view all requests by Satisfaction by viewing "Fast", "Sluggish", "Too Slow", or "Failed" types of requests.  Another report includes graphs of HTTP Error%, Satisfaction Score%, and Page Load Time.  Lastly, you will have the ability to sort each page request of your App by different categories: Satisfaction, Slowest page, Failed pages, pages hit, and total load time.  By clicking on an individual page a Performance Details page with further information about that specific page's health, performance, and errors will be displayed.Screenshot of Performance Traces:
One of the ways we strive to deliver relevant insights is to only collect traces around interesting requests. Some examples of these request types that are interesting would be faster than normal, slower than normal, new web requests, requests introducing new SQL, requests introducing new exceptions, or abnormal satisfaction scores. Under performing requests will be profiled more often than fast requests. As long as the app is getting steady traffic Retrace should be saving a trace every 5 to 15 minutes.Screenshot of Errors Dashboard:
From the Errors Dashboard, you can get an overview of all the exceptions of all your applications across different environments. It gives you a central location to view details about your errors.