Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs. Cisco ThousandEyes

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Secure Network Analytics
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Stealthwatch is a network behavior analysis product based on technology acquired by Cisco with its Lancope acquisition in 2015.N/A
Cisco ThousandEyes
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cisco ThousandEyes empowers organizations to assure every digital experience across every network, everywhere, every time.N/A
Pricing
Cisco Secure Network AnalyticsCisco ThousandEyes
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Secure Network AnalyticsCisco ThousandEyes
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Secure Network AnalyticsCisco ThousandEyes
Considered Both Products
Cisco Secure Network Analytics
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
I wasn't involved in the decision-making when it happened. It was a couple of years ago, but I can't think of the vendor's name. They used to be here at Cisco Live. But it was another NetFlow vendor, but they were strictly NetFlow and all they did was just a net flow and the …
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
After integrating and developing a lot of security features in MF NNM, we were not able to meet the requirements from the customer. After the alternative research, we got to know about this Cisco Secure Network Analytics tool and after implementing the same, we finally were …
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
While other platforms such as Nagios and Solarwinds NTA provide visibility of the traffic, it either (*) does not provide API/programmatic way to pull the data to other platforms or (*) does not interface with secondary security systems to report on malicious traffic activity. …
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
In order for Armis to truly provide value, it will require spans and taps at every location. This is not feasible in most places since not all sides have the infrastructure to support this and now you are required to support an additional appliance at every site. Stealthwatch …
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
Wireshark is a good option in a lower budget, but Wireshark also has lesser security as compared to Cisco which compelled us to look for something else in [the] same price but with more better features.
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
We use this in concert with Stealthwatch to help cut through the noise and get quicker drilldown times.
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
In addition [to] Cisco SteathWatch, we highly evaluated Cisco AnyConnect and Cisco Advanced Malware Protection for Endpoints (Cisco APM4E). Often [these] solutions complement each other and improve network security level. Each of them separate[ly] [are] handy products for …
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
Cisco has advantages in terms of the following:
1. Encrypted Traffic Analytics provides visibility and control to traffic without the need to decrypt it.
2. Threat detection that collects proxy records and associates them with flow records, delivering the user application, and …
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
I haven't used any other products like StealthWatch in the past.
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
NTOP is the only thing out there, in my opinion, that provides similar type of visibility. But StealthWatch is the product all vendors should strive to emulate. It is easy to install; it is easy to configure; it works as advertised (and then some). I do recommend the …
Chose Cisco Secure Network Analytics
Cisco Secure Network Analytics is in a class of its own and some of these products come close but are not in the same class. The other products I tested take a lot more of them to get the same results you would from the Enterprise class of Cisco products. I have been very happy …
Cisco ThousandEyes
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
LogicMonitor, SolarWinds AppOptics and Zabbix
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
Cisco ThousandEyes offers better compatibility.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
ISP, SDWAN, Cloud, etc. These all can be monitored via thousandEyes. Provide Digital experience Monitoring and have great benefits.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
It is a similar product to Cisco ThousandEyes. Both solutions give good network monitoring and traffic analysis. But Cisco ThousandEyes works better with Cisco devices and has real-time alerts that are very useful. It also helps to see network problems faster and make …
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
This technology helps us and our customers understand the value and importance of our business. Not only for our business but also for Cisco business. We are developing a lot of apps in .net so we will like to have support for that in Cisco products that we and our customers …
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
We did briefly look into DynaTrace, but it was too much product for what we needed though and was much more expensive then just adding the licensing to our Cisco existing licenses.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
Juniper RPM offers device config level sla testing in the service stream layer. Whilst this is good and is monitorable via snmp, the config can be fiddly and needs a Juniper device at the other end as a reply point
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
far superior to other solutions
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
Cisco ThousandEyes has a great "macro" view and gui allowing easy to understand metrics. It also makes it easy to run synthetic application tests to measure reachability between two endpoints.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
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 …
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
It has efficient bgp monitoring.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
Cisco 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers (ASR 9000) and Cisco Catalyst Center
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
Connected directly to the switch. Other vendors all seem to be add-ons. They claim they are different, but I don't know why I would go spend additional money for another product.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
Better data based analysis and visualization.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
They complement each other and have a good synergy with monitoring across the estate.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
ThousandEyes is significantly better for network and infrastructure data. Whereas New Relic is currently better for our laptop/desktop estate.
Chose Cisco ThousandEyes
None were evaluated - we are a Cisco gold partner, we used ThousandEyes as part of our demonstration facilities to upsell the wider Cisco stack.
Best Alternatives
Cisco Secure Network AnalyticsCisco ThousandEyes
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

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Score 9.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.5 out of 10
Catchpoint
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Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
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User Ratings
Cisco Secure Network AnalyticsCisco ThousandEyes
Likelihood to Recommend
7.6
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(0 ratings)
6.4
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Availability
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.9
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Secure Network AnalyticsCisco ThousandEyes
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Secure Network Analytics is a compulsion to any organization looking to secure their network in silence with a complete record and analysis of the threats. All the critical information of the client is also preserved for instance and assistance for future needs. Cyber-attacks can’t even think to roam about your
network in any case.
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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.
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Pros
  • It's really good at mapping out like what applications are, like who's talking to what. To see if someone thinks that a particular application is only being used a certain way and we can validate what's talking to that system with the tool.
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  • Agent to Agent testing. Full round trip test. Have a customer using a Server Side API that is having an issue. Loan a Nuc, or have them install the ThousandEyes agent in their network. You'll find the issue guaranteed.
  • Device Layer vision - ability to see from the server, through the Firewall, switches Proxy and internet. Measure jitter, latency, response time, load time and see the path your packet takes.
  • Share your tests live. Provide the customer a link to a live test, they can see what you do, review your metrics and verify your tests. They can also use it as a tool to better their service. Build the trust and stickiness with your customers' most difficult users - the IT Operations team.
  • Validate your QOS and routes for VOIP, video conferences, and data traffic. Highly flexible and configurable complete with transaction-based testing, custom headers, calls and tools to mimic any scenario you need.
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Cons
  • Tool is little hard to configure so need to be light to save resource consumption.
  • Features are so in-depth that integrated guidance should be available to help the users on how to use.
  • Graphical view can be improved to make it more convenient to understand the data representation.
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  • We have the product, we have a fair amount of wireless issues. You have to go through so many hoops, links and selections that I would think would've been impossible. Maybe if you have a specialized engineer, you would be able to use the thousandeyes product to troubleshoot a problem. But if I want to share with our knock, for example, would be very challenging because there is so many paths that you have to go and there is so many assumptions you have to do to actually find the root cause of the problem. What I would expect is maybe what they can do is implementing some AI today on this product to give some hints, "hey, this might be the problem because the data is there but it's difficult to find." We need an easier way to find how we can use the platform to point out where's the root cause of those problems.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco Secure Network Analytics is a fantastic tool, but does require some setup and upkeep which may turn off smaller IT Security teams. However, once all the flows are set up and the product is functioning with the proper rules, the insight into your network is fantastic. For us, the product has a significant ROI and will be a product we keep up on.
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We will definitely renew and maybe even extend our usage of ThousandEyes. We have been using ThousandEyes now for a couple of years and it has shown us major benefits. With the new options it offers for SD-WAN for us it is a no brainer to renew our current licenses
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Usability
Strong and complete tool which gives comprehensive methods to discover cyber security incidents and prevent data leakage. In case of common use of Cisco StealthWatch and Cisco ISE, you will receive [the] ability [to] not just discover cyber security incidents but also dynamically respond to them. This makes StealthWatch one of most valuable products through[out] [the] whole Cisco Security product portfolio.
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There is definitely a learning curve to ThousandEyes, but once you understand how the client deployment works and how to set up monitoring, things go pretty smoothly. I think the initial setting up of clients on endpoints can be a little tricky though.
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Reliability and Availability
We haven't had too many issues with the uptime and availability of CSNA, but the application does have a lot of dependancies and we have seen issues after an upgrade that caused an outage for several hours.
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Being cloud hosted means that you are at the mercy of Cisco web services, but we've had absolutely no issues with its availability.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
The client is very lightweight on endpoints and the user interface is very fast and fluid.
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Support Rating
Overall winner because it exceeds our expectations by answering all our requirements and at the same time empowers our operations thru other built-in capabilities it has. Visibility is a key to security operations and Cisco StealthWatch really gives us a magnifying glass to check all logs in the network for threat intelligence and threat hunting.
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You have online support from the tool itself 24/7 and they are very responsive. We also have a specific account manager and specific engineer assigned to help us with very specific questions for our environment. The level of response to our requirements is always super high. We have requested specific features to be added and these have been developed and introduced very quick tot he product (within weeks). Their DevOps and agile approach seems to pay off.
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In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
Our Cisco reps actually had someone teach us a few things about the functionality of ThousandEyes, and it helped a lot. The training was good and we had follow-up assistance as well when we had questions about the monitoring and reporting functions. Overall, we were satisfied with the training and support.
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Implementation Rating
Implementation of the product can be tedious, especially fine tuning its rules to customize it to your environment. However, after that is done, CSNA is a very useful and flexible product that would enhance the security posture of any corporate network.
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Our implementation was pretty straightforward, with some issues loading clients on endpoints. We didn't have any notable issues, and I don't really have any additional insights.
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Alternatives Considered
While other platforms such as Nagios and Solarwinds NTA provide visibility of the traffic, it either (*) does not provide API/programmatic way to pull the data to other platforms or (*) does not interface with secondary security systems to report on malicious traffic activity. Ultimately, these platforms accomplish the visibility, but do little else in the overall IT/security ecosystem of product, making them "dead end" data flow products where data goes in but does not share elsewhere.
Read full review
It is a similar product to Cisco ThousandEyes. Both solutions give good network monitoring and traffic analysis. But Cisco ThousandEyes works better with Cisco devices and has real-time alerts that are very useful. It also helps to see network problems faster and make troubleshooting easier. Cisco ThousandEyes is also better for checking SaaS and cloud apps like Azure, AWS, Webex, etc. It has endpoint agents that show network quality directly from user devices. The web interface is simple to use, so the learning curve is not too steep. Also, it has many monitoring points around the world, making it easy to check performance outside the company network.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
I think this product would be infinitely scalable since it's all cloud hosted and can support thousands of endpoints if needed. We are only using it for a limited number of endpoints, so we never really considered scalability.
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Return on Investment
  • Once tuned and baselines established, it is far easier to identify issues on a network
  • Management is able to look at the dashboard and fairly quickly get an update on the status of how the network is performing and what threats may be out there
  • Reports can be scheduled to send on a regular basis to all involved with management of the infrastructure and the security team
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  • ThousandEyes has helped us quickly isolate issues on some high-profile (within the organization) incidents and whether the network (internally or on the Internet) is at fault. If it is, it becomes easier to see the "where" of the issues quicker so we can move onto what the issue is faster. In the case of non-network related issues, it helps us get the appropriate teams or individuals involved sooner.
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ScreenShots

Cisco ThousandEyes Screenshots

Screenshot of global availability issues for users trying to use Slack application.Screenshot of the path visibility feature pinpointing where in the transit path an outage or event is occurring.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Internet Insights™, which combines a massive data set with algorithmic outage detection to provide near real-time insights into a business's SaaS applications.  and networks. Internet Insights can be used to manage digital experience at Internet scale.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Event Detection diagnosing events as server or network issue.