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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SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset
Score 8.7 out of 10
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SolarWinds® Engineer’s Toolset (ETS) helps users monitor and troubleshoot a network with over 60 tools for network management. ETS allows users to monitor and receive alerts in real time on network availability and health, and perform network diagnostics for faster troubleshooting and resolution of complex
network issues. With ETS users can deploy an array of network discovery tools including Port Scanner, Switch Port Mapper or advanced Subnet Calculator, manage Cisco®
devices with specialized…
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.
I have found the toolset especially useful for scanning subnets to discover devices, and for setting up temporary real-time monitors when we are troubleshooting or setting up new connections. The most useful aspect has been the ability to apply the tools to help troubleshoot and pinpoint intermittent issues. More general tools like Orion often do not have the granularity to detect issues like intermittent packet loss which are especially impactful to applications like Voice. The toolset gives us another level of capability to dig into issues.
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.
The unifying component that is intended to be the initial interface to the tools seems clunky. I prefer to start the tools individually rather than using it.
The port scanner could use some improvements to make it easier to use.
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.
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.
I haven't compared any tools similar to SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset. This might be because I'm pretty biased when it comes to monitoring, and reporting solutions. I've found that SolarWinds provides the biggest bang for the buck in my opinion. I'm sure there are other solutions on the market that compete, but I haven't tried any of them because I've been very satisfied with SolarWinds.
