Cisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.
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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
SolarWinds is cost-effective, we have a great solution provider that helps us with tool integrations and maintenance, the integration capability and extensive documentation also help a lot in the ability to use it in various monitoring models and scripts.
SolarWinds is comparable to many of the network monitoring solutions above. They are doing similar things. SolarWinds has a great user community called THWACK. SolarWinds is an affordable solution no matter the size of the network. Their support is decent. They are more of a …
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.
For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
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.
Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.
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
We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.
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.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.
The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.
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.
I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.
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.
It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.
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.
Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time.
We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting.
