Cisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.
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Splunk Enterprise
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Splunk is software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data, via a web-style interface. It captures, indexes and correlates real-time data in a searchable repository from which it can generate graphs, reports, alerts, dashboards and visualizations.
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.
We selected ThousandEyes because we liked the ease of use of a SaaS platform that was easy to configure and begin collecting data on our network. The price point was also a deciding factor as we saved a lot of money on an annual basis and got improved functionality.
Splunk features of storing data and ingestion of logs , indexing of data , data analytics make is superior to other tools. Definately there is more improvement requirement in terms of visualisation of data but one stop for all features make splunk better than various other …
We have several network and server monitoring tools due to legacy agreements and consolidation of teams over time. We will be eliminating several of these tools because Splunk does so much that they are not all needed. We have also customized Splunk to meet other needs in 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.
It's well suited for what I do, which is network security operations. And that's for anything from troubleshooting incidents, troubleshooting performance, troubleshooting for the purpose of a compliance and auditing. It's not best suited for users who are new in terms of they're new to the product and they have expectations that probably Splunk cannot meet.
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.
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.
We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.
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.
You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.
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.
Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.
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.
The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.
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.
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.
I didn't get to fully evaluate Logstash as our corporation was already using Logstash, but both seemed like viable solutions to the problem that we were having. I wanted to evaluate Logstash some more, both did seem like they would work for the business needs that we had, we went with splunk as many teams were already using it.
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.
I don't have any numbers to share but Splunk has positively served as a 24/7 monitoring tool that has saved hours of work by self-detecting, saving statistics and alerting problems in the system or from external interfaces as soon as they happen.
Splunk dashboards does a solid job in collecting, analyzing data and creating reports that contain an entire day's activity and then automatically sent out to the business.
Splunk is very easy to learn and very useful to any program or business application.
