Item: Cisco ThousandEyes
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it specifically within our Security Services business group to monitor the availability and performance of both our own platforms and customer infrastructures. As a service provider, it's critical that we understand how we are impacted by issues outside of our own network infrastructure. We also use the ThousandEyes service to understand the quality of our services from our customer's point of view.

Pros and Cons

Excellent UI that provides a lot of power without being overly complex.
APIs are full featured and easy to use.
Enterprise agent deployment is well packaged and documented.
Ability to share and export test results is immensely helpful.
Internet Insights has a lot of potential, as ThousandEye's user base continues to grow.

pricing model is complicated and mysterious.
There is a bit of a learning curve to understanding how tests and alerts work.
Would like more ability to organize and view test results. Using account groups helps, but a master view across account groups would be very useful.
would like more cloud agents inside eyeball networks.

Return on Investment

We saved over $1.5M in annual revenue in 2020 by leveraging ThousandEyes to identify and monitor critical customer infrastructures.
We have cut down out mean time to remediate customer network issues by 40% since ThousandEyes was implemented
Since we started using ThousandEyes, our customer retention has increased from 78% to 90%.

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds Pingdom, NETSCOUT nGeniusPULSE, Nagios Network Analyzer and Neustar Webmetrics

We have found ThousandEyes to be more full-featured than many of its competitors. Many of them were more tailored strictly for operating inside a corporate network and weren't flexible enough to adapt to our service provider use case. Other competitors, simply didn't have the breadth of options or were overly complex to implement and use.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco ThousandEyes delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco ThousandEyes's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco ThousandEyes live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco ThousandEyes go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco ThousandEyes again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Kentik

Likelihood to Recommend

It's an excellent tool for monitoring your infrastructure from your customer's point of view. There are a large number of cloud agents available and the ability to share exactly what you are looking at with anyone, even outside of your organization is excellent for customer service groups. There are many connector options to send alerts to common chat and network event management platforms, as well. If all you need are basic ping or network types of tests, these may be less expensive options for your use case, however.

ThousandEyes Within Service Providers

Overall Satisfaction with ThousandEyes