Cisco ThousandEyes offers Digital Experience Monitoring that integrates application performance monitoring within a broader network monitoring platform. It primarily focuses on connectivity monitoring and supports SaaS and hybrid systems monitoring.
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PingPlotter
Score 9.4 out of 10
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PingPlotter is a graphical traceroute and ping tool that visualizes network performance in a way that makes identifying the source of problems quicker and easier for everyone from online gamers and video streamers to VoIP admins and IT pros. Features for remote deployment, network monitoring, scripting, and a web interface are included along with several additional capabilities.
At least for me, it is a very important tool to diagnose bandwidth / Routing issues. Any global company should have ThousandEyes, it will avoid you many headaches. You'll need to invest in servers (on-prem and remote) in all locations in which you need, you can take advantage of all the monitoring tools.
It is well suited for performing monitoring and testing from a single device. It is less appropriate if you have to monitor from multiple different endpoints. That type of deployment would be more of an enterprise application. If you are looking for an end user monitoring solution then PingPlotter is the one for you.
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.
Its a little confusing to see which targets are currently running pings and which ones are displayed in the plots.
Starting and stopping pings requires a right click and that would be better with a play/pause button I think.
Ability to drag and drop the graphs to reorder them.
more columns to show which targets are running and which are displayed. Currently this is done with symbols so you cant sort by just the running targets for example I've found.
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
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 have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.
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 built in the enterprise agents to their 9300 and 9500 switches has made exposure to the platform widespread.
A balance of a generic tool vs a network equipment product is necessary when investigating network incidents or disruptions. Need to train the engineer to use both tools to perform their analysis and to dive down to the issues as fast as they can. Experience with the tools will continue to play a part if we were to adopt PingPlotter
