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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TotalView
Score 7.3 out of 10
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PathSolution’s TotalView is a network performance monitoring tool. PathSolutions emphasizes the platform’s issue diagnostics and recommended remediation assistance as a key differentiator.
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.
TotalView is well suited for an infrastructure where you are looking for a cost-effective, additive network management tool for in-depth device diagnostic information. This will not be a one-stop shop application, but it does what is advertised very well. SNMP is required for configuration and adding additional devices is quick and simple. This product also works well with Shoretel VoIP systems and allows for a full overview of connected phones along with being able to view calls on an extension/IP basis.
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.
If you have some complexities in your network addressing, the network diagram tool will lay everything out automatically, but it will be confusing to look at. There is a way to edit the diagram so it looks more intuitive, but it may require some time to edit everything the right way.
TotalView will count virtual interfaces such as voice dial-peers and service modules as "ports," which counts against your license count. However, there is a way to edit each device to remove these "false positives" so it doesn't suck up licenses, but it can take some time to clean those up.
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.
The three tools listed do different things with some similarities. For us the biggest need was data analysis, semi-automatic troubleshooting, and data gathering and topology mapping. TotalView hit the most of these in the price point we were looking for. Each tool has "extras," but we felt that the extras provided by TotalView were good enough and that the other tools didn't justify the cost.
