What is ThousandEyes?

Quick Definition: ThousandEyes is a powerful network monitoring and intelligence platform that provides unparalleled visibility into network performance and user experience. It leverages a vast network of cloud, enterprise, and internet vantage points to collect real-time data on network performance, routing, and connectivity.

Reliable network performance is critical for businesses of all sizes. Network problems can quickly lead to lost work, lower revenue, and unhappy customers. ThousandEyes helps by thoroughly checking networks, using active tests and smart data analysis to show what's happening in real-time. This way, businesses can spot and fix issues fast, keeping everything running smoothly.

In other words, ThousandEyes is a tool that enables businesses to make data-driven decisions, reduce downtime, and deliver exceptional user experiences.

Now that you know what ThousandEyes is, let’s find out what it has to offer. 

ThousandEyes Features Overview

ThousandEyes provides visibility into network performance and internet health through a comprehensive suite of monitoring tools that include both active and passive techniques. It offers a detailed view of network paths, including latency, packet loss, jitter, and Quality of Service (QoS) markers, enriched with reverse DNS (rDNS) and geolocation data. 

For those looking to master these features and prepare for the Cisco 300-445 ENNA certification, CBT Nuggets offers an in-depth online training course. The training covers the use of ThousandEyes tools to monitor, analyze, troubleshoot, and optimize enterprise networks, ensuring a seamless digital experience.

This allows for a complete understanding of network path behavior. Plus, it integrates and visualizes Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route feeds alongside network views, giving both current and historical snapshots of internet service delivery. 

Device-layer metrics and topological network discovery further enable visibility into your network environment, allowing for quick issue identification and resolution. 

ThousandEyes emulates real user experiences with page loading and multi-step transactions, providing snapshots, detailed waterfalls, and performance metrics. This enables a deep understanding of web performance from the user's perspective. 

The platform also offers visibility into DNS performance, ensuring critical DNS services remain reachable and validating DNS records to deliver a seamless user experience. Additionally, ThousandEyes keeps tabs on internet and application outages in real time, allowing businesses to react swiftly to protect users' digital experiences. 

ThousandEyes can also be great for preparing to conduct vulnerability assessments and pentesting (VaPt), as it allows for pre-assessment network mapping, external dependency analysis, and even post-test monitoring. 

What are the Key Features of ThousandEyes?

ThousandEyes offers a wide range of features designed to enhance network visibility and monitor the digital experience. Key features of ThousandEyes include:

End User Monitoring

The End User Monitoring (EUM) feature provides real-time insights into how applications and services perform from the end user's perspective. ThousandEyes captures critical performance metrics such as page load times, application responsiveness, and network connectivity issues by deploying browser-based plugins and agents on user devices. Abnormal behavior can come from the most unlikely of sources, such as plugins on a WordPress site. 

ThousandEyes' detailed visibility helps IT teams quickly identify and troubleshoot problems, ensuring digital services are delivered effectively across any network​​​​.

WAN Insights

WAN Insights leverages advanced statistical models to analyze telemetry data from your Wide Area Network (WAN), including Cisco SD-WAN. It provides predictive insights and recommendations to optimize network performance before issues impact user experience. 

This proactive approach allows network teams to fine-tune SD-WAN policies based on Quality of Experience (QoE) scores, ensuring the network is optimized for reliability. WAN Insights helps prevent network degradation and supports a continuous improvement cycle by forecasting potential network conditions and recommending adjustments.

Network and Application Synthetics

Network and Application Synthetics offers a comprehensive view into the performance of both the network infrastructure and the applications running on it. It simulates user transactions and network paths and provides detailed insights into every layer of the digital delivery chain. 

This allows organizations to proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve performance issues before they impact the end user. Its ability to pinpoint issues helps ensure the availability and reliability of internally hosted and cloud-based applications. 

Internet Insights

Internet Insights gathers a wide view of the internet's health by analyzing data from billions of online measurements. This tool gives businesses a real-time look at major network problems and slowdowns worldwide, showing how these issues could affect their digital services and customer experiences. 

It lets companies quickly spot and deal with internet issues, reducing potential impacts on their work. This is key for keeping cloud-based applications and services reliable.

ThousandEyes Pricing Guide

ThousandEyes pricing is structured as an annual subscription and offers different price points based on usage. The pricing model considers several factors, focusing on the scope of visibility required by the organization. Key factors influencing ThousandEyes pricing include:

• Monitoring agents: ThousandEyes offers cloud and endpoint agents for monitoring. The number and type of agents deployed play a significant role in price. 

• Test types: ThousandEyes supports various test types, including network, application, and internet insights tests. More complex and frequent tests require higher Unit consumption.

• Data retention: Longer data retention periods for historical performance data require additional storage capacity and increased Unit consumption.

Since ThousandEyes' pricing structure is usage-based, cost varies based on your organization's needs​​.

ThousandEyes Use Cases and Benefits

Businesses are increasingly leveraging ThousandEyes to improve their network monitoring strategies. For example, a transportation company can address and diagnose application timeouts over the WAN network, pinpointing the issue to a specific time related to device roaming and remediating the WAN link effectively. 

ThousandEyes has many benefits — both direct and indirect. For instance, it’s great for protecting against identity theft. Employees don’t have to wonder what someone can do with their ID, as ThousandEyes can quickly pinpoint vulnerabilities and monitor network use of third parties that might be slyly looking to steal personal information. 

But that's not all; other benefits include:

• Enhanced visibility into the digital experience across any network, helping to identify and solve problems quickly.

• The ability to provide a consistent user experience for applications hosted anywhere through "inside-out" visibility from the organization to the applications.

• Insights into the "Customer Digital Experience" by assessing the experience of external users accessing applications.

• Visibility into hybrid-WAN or SD-WAN environments, helping understand network performance and connectivity.

Additionally, ThousandEyes is integrated into Cisco Catalyst 9000 switches, offering advantages such as: 

• Deployment at the network edge for closer endpoint connectivity monitoring

• Leveraging existing computer resources 

• supporting a range of tests, including DNS, HTTP Server, and Network tests. 

This integration allows network administrators to effectively monitor the "Employee Digital Experience" and support the "WAN Experience" from within the network accessing the outside world​​​​​​.

Conclusion and Recommendations

ThousandEyes is essential for modern network monitoring. It provides deep visibility into network performance, allowing businesses to quickly detect and fix issues before they impact operations. With extensive global monitoring and intelligent analytics, it helps optimize networks for seamless connectivity and flawless application delivery.

Businesses considering ThousandEyes should evaluate their needs and consider the pricing options. While ThousandEyes may cost more than basic monitoring tools, the investment can pay off through reduced downtime and improved efficiency. 

Want to learn more about ThousandEyes? Consider our Network Monitoring and Threat Detection In-Depth Online Training!