Item: Cisco ThousandEyes
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco ThousandEyes

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco ThousandEyes to monitor nodes in colocation facilities around the USA. The biggest problem that Cisco ThousandEyes addresses is being able to do off-net test to compare between our network and external networks. This allows us to create historical baselines and verify web reachability for customers that may have issues getting to specific websites. Sometimes those issues are local but Cisco ThousandEyes helps us verify if they are global or part of a larger issue.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to setup
Easy to use
Good support team, quick response
High level of customization for dashboards and testing

Cons

Pricing = unit cost

Return on Investment

Great ROI on using endpoint agents to help diagnose end user issues when they can't explain the issue.
The cost per unit should probably be evaluated, it's not awful pricing but doesn't feel like a big value when buying them in bulk like you'd think you could get.
Cisco ThousandEyes is a robust platform that has given our Network & Backbone teams the flexibility of testing and visibility into the network as a whole from many different levels.

Alternatives Considered

Kentik

Kentik Synthetics is a newer competitor of Cisco ThousandEyes. Both do very similar things but Cisco ThousandEyes currently is the more mature platform. However, the pricing of Synthetics is very attractive. It does not have the robustness of Cisco ThousandEyes or the off-net test leveraging (# of outside companies partnered with them) but has made many improvements in the past 2 years.

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

As a service provider that is in multiple datacenters it's a great tool to use and leverage. Alot of smaller providers are only using NMS nodes that are hosted in their HQ or in spots that aren't where their content is hosted. Being able to run tests directly from your datacenters (between them or to the content provider itself) gives more accurate results.

The downside is if you have no server infrastructure you'll have to install servers/machines to utilize it.

Comments

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Robust, customizable monitoring solution