ThousandEyes Platform Overview
ThousandEyes is a powerful network monitoring and intelligence platform designed to provide unparalleled visibility into network performance and user experience. Acquired by Cisco, this SaaS-based solution is tailored to help modern IT organizations deliver flawless digital experiences across various networks, including those they do not directly own.
Key Functionality
End-to-End Visibility
ThousandEyes offers comprehensive visibility across the entire digital experience service delivery chain. It measures performance from any user to any application, over any network, using a vast network of global vantage points and billions of daily measurements. This includes visualizing data across multiple layers in a single, time-correlated view, encompassing synthetic transactions, service availability, network paths, and global Internet routing feeds.
AI-Driven Intelligence
The platform harnesses AI to automatically surface issues and insights in the context of user experience. It correlates diverse metrics across every layer of the digital infrastructure, enabling the identification and resolution of issues before they impact operations. This AI-driven intelligence also provides real-time detection of network and application outages, allowing for swift reactions to protect users’ digital experiences.
Closed-Loop Operations
ThousandEyes goes beyond issue identification by offering AI-powered recommendations and seamless integrations to implement and automate actions across the connected IT ecosystem. This closed-loop approach ensures that issues are not only detected but also remediated efficiently, optimizing connectivity and maintaining brand reputation, revenue, and employee productivity.
Key Features
End User Monitoring
ThousandEyes provides real-time insights into how applications and services perform from the end user’s perspective. It captures critical performance metrics such as page load times, application responsiveness, and network connectivity issues through browser-based plugins and agents on user devices. This feature helps IT teams quickly identify and troubleshoot problems, ensuring digital services are delivered effectively.
WAN Insights
The platform enables IT operations teams to preemptively prevent network issues rather than reacting to them. It offers detailed views of network paths, including latency, packet loss, jitter, and Quality of Service (QoS) markers, enriched with reverse DNS (rDNS) and geolocation data. This allows for proactive management of WAN performance.
Internet Insights
ThousandEyes provides global network and application outage detection, giving immediate understanding of issue source, scope, and scale. It integrates and visualizes Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route feeds alongside network views, offering both current and historical insights into service and delivery over the Internet. The platform also tracks global Internet disruptions in real-time, ensuring users are informed about outages affecting critical applications and networks.
Network and Application Synthetics
The platform emulates real user experiences with page loading and multi-step transactions, providing detailed waterfalls and performance metrics. This feature ensures a deep understanding of web performance from the user’s perspective and helps in identifying and resolving issues related to DNS performance and internet connectivity.
Integrations & Ecosystem
ThousandEyes integrates with various collaboration, data, AIOps, IT service management (ITSM) tools, and supported Cisco platforms. These integrations facilitate the leveraging of performance insights, automation of workflows and alerts, and the utilization of rich visualizations. Developer resources, including OpenTelemetry (OTel), Webhooks, a comprehensive API, and a Terraform provider, further enhance the platform’s flexibility and customization capabilities.
Solutions and Use Cases
ThousandEyes is designed to address a wide range of digital experience needs, including:
- Customer Digital Experience: Proactive visibility into the delivery of web applications across any network to detect and troubleshoot issues quickly.
- Enterprise Digital Experience: Understanding underlying dependencies across the Internet and into the cloud to optimize and sustain the digital supply chain.
- Workforce Digital Experience: Delivering a high-performing hybrid work environment by ensuring the usability of business-critical applications and the performance of underlying networks and Internet-based infrastructure.
Additionally, ThousandEyes integrates with various Cisco technologies such as Cisco SD-WAN, Cisco Catalyst 9000 switches, AppDynamics, and Webex to provide optimized digital experiences across these solutions.
In summary, ThousandEyes is a robust platform that empowers IT teams to deliver exceptional digital experiences by providing end-to-end visibility, AI-driven intelligence, and seamless integrations, thereby ensuring the smooth operation of critical networks and applications.