Great value for cost on network monitoring

It is used widely by the internal Telecom Support team for all sites (900+) and regions in the company. Is used mainly in two ways:

• Proactive identification of incidents.
• T-shooting active incidents.

We have all of the selected technologies totally deployed with the exception of ThousandEyes where we're still about 60%-70% of the rollout (2nd round post Cisco acquisition). I wish some of these deployments were as simple as advertised by the vendor. Of course these may be as complex as the environment where these are deployed. However, once they are deployed they are rock solid and it's pretty straight forward to maintain it. Cisco is trying to keep up with modern technologies but it looks like their broad family of products delays the modernization of some of those platforms. For instance, DNA Center has great functionality to manage large infrastructure environments but there's many simple tasks still missing such as a reliable "patch management" to keep all Cisco products at the right OS level and reporting vulnerabilities based on real IOS version AND configuration of the device as opposed to just the installed OS. Another example is providing an easy to use APIs to integrate with other tools. From a sales perspective we have found occasions where something is confirmed and after the purchase the story changes. I'd suggest always getting the roadmaps, licensing and warranty/support agreements in writing when it's not officially announced yet. Fortunately I can't say that this has happened often.

- IT infrastructure did not have the required capacity for a massive percentage of the population working remotely.- Not all the applications and services were designed to be used remotely.- Not all employees or departments were prepared to work in a hybrid mode, specially where part of the team is on-site and part is remote.- Different regulations for remote workers in different countries.

Cisco solutions have certainly helped us to enable remote connectivity for every employee in the company while securing the environment. It's also helped us to provide the wireless coverage we need in the majority of our sites. With ThousandEyes we have been able to create monitoring rules and patterns to alert us of significant issues depending on how many monitoring endpoints present the same problem simultaneously and the locations where these happen.

Additional productivity that is translated to more revenue. Better work-life balance for employees resulting in reduced attrition. All of that while increasing security for the company. Business units are less concerned now about where the work is being done and they can focus on the quality of the work. Remote collaboration is now natural across the organization as opposed to just an option for "techies" that many would prefer not to take or know much about.

Cisco brand provides a very robust set of services if you're looking for a stable environment. Granted, I'm not sure that it innovates as fast as some of their competitors or even as they used to do years ago but they are not followers either in the Telecom industry, like other tech giant companies. Their focus on SDN (Software Defined Networks) has allowed them to remain as one of the top Tech companies in the market.