Cisco ThousandEyes

RichRelevance is the Global Leader in Personalization with over 240 merchants and brands serving more than 550 sites in 44 countries and 32 languages. We serve over 1 Billion personalization decisions per day from 14 datacenters located across the world. We have enjoyed 100% uptime at our Front End datacenters for more than 8 years.

We use our ThousandEyes monitoring solution to create test paths, quality metrics and insights to the worldwide traffic. This is a partnership gamechanger for us – and my datacenter vendors like that I can talk to their level of understanding regional traffic and customer requirements. This creates a strong partnership with my providers and by extension better service to my customers.

Conversely to my providers, I can take our tests and provide live shares to our customer's Operations teams to drill down into response times, QOS and all delivery metrics from over 100 ThousandEyes test centers to our datacenters every few minutes. We test our 14 centers every 3-5 seconds from somewhere in the world.

They are core to our building trust in our services and our infrastructure. During Thanksgiving in 2016 when there was a 10Gb core route outage in Germany affecting all of central Europe and even routes to APAC and USA. TE alerted us early and we were able to provide charts and route issues to our affected customers. It changed what their perception was of “You are failing” to “the tubes were broken”. RichRelevance earned the trust of many of our customers in Europe that day. We were able to inform our customer faster and more detailed than their carrier/provider did – allowing them to get rerouted and back up within 30 mins. We have since used this tool to solve issues across the world within minutes, from bad routes to server latency, poor page loads or problematic customer implementations. We provide access to our Consultants, engineers and even customers via our NUC loaner program.

Since then we have expanded into using the Device Layer product, Agent to Agent testing and also bought the Intel NUC's that we share with customers to place ThousandEyes Enterprise agents inside their networks when they are experiencing issues. This provides true round-trip end to end metrics/insights via their Agent to Agent testing. This has created a really great partnership with the merchant's tech teams and RichRelevance's - having champions in the IT department is an awesome card to carry.

ThousandEyes is used by our network engineering team for detailed internet reachability metrics and provides a valuable resource when troubleshooting connectivity between our customers and our data centers.

We are protecting our network. This can help use manage our network equipment to manage and maintain the security of our customers. We use Cisco ThousandEyes in every deployment of the new system and we are committed to providing our customers with the right solutions for their business needs in order to ensure that they are ready for the next level.

A thousand eyes is a great product. And we came across this when we were looking to have a deeper insight into VoIP call issues. We tested both the enterprise agent and the endpoint agent. The enterprise agent is installed on a switch and the endpoint agent is installed on a user end device. Here are some of the pros and cons of the product, The Pros: 1. Provides real-time network monitoring for DHCP, DNS, HTTP (Weblink monitoring, Network path visualization. 2. Network performance tests can be set up for remote VPN users to monitor issues like latency, jitter. 3. Easy user interface 4. Alerts can be set up with thresholds 5. Support is very responsive Cons: 1. Running tests frequently (every 5-10 min) for a large number of sites can put a load so the test results will take time to load. 2. The endpoint agent does not offer a deep dive and can be improved to include more tests that can be set up to monitor network performance. 4. It is an expensive product.

We use 1keyes to monitor our business and clinical applications.