Catchpoint vs. Cisco ThousandEyes

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Catchpoint
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Catchpoint is an Internet Resilience solution offering services for retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs that help increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Intenet Stack before they impact their business.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
CatchpointCisco ThousandEyes
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CatchpointCisco ThousandEyes
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details- White glove migration services - Annual subscription - Professional Services - Competitive Benchmarking
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CatchpointCisco ThousandEyes
User Ratings
CatchpointCisco ThousandEyes
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
6.4
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.7
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CatchpointCisco ThousandEyes
Likelihood to Recommend
Proactive Website and API performance testing, Synthetic monitoring, and third-party integration are where Catchpoint is best suited. Catchpoint is less appropriate in Deep Application Performance monitoring, debugging complex user journeys in real-time, Small businesses, and Mobile app performance monitoring. These are the scenarios where I find Catchpoint is well-suited and scenarios where it is less appropriate.
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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
  • Catchpoint Synthetics: We create our synthetic monitoring using catchpoint. Creating the synthetics monitors are easy and requires basic knowledge on selenium and javascript. It allows you to run the test from external(backbone) and internal enterprise nodes. The screenshot and filmstrip feature is an add-on along with various customisations. Once created, It provides a detailed insight of each request that is involved in the application flow which helps us in addressing the issue at the request level.
  • Catchpoint API Test: This is another kind of test which we have explored in our organisation. This has helped us to maintain the health check of our APIs and also we have utilised it for a variety of our use cases.
  • Catchpoint Dashboard: This is our one-stop shop for all our monitors. It has multiple widgets that displays various application performance metrics. We use this feature immensely and it is of great value to the business.
  • Catchpoint UI: It is very user friendly and with basic introduction anyone can just get started with it.
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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
  • The ability to monitor the Catchpoint nodes with the ability to setup a take a recovery action based on specific criteria
  • The ability to tell us when we are at X% capacity so that we better plan or budget for increasing the "capacity" of the Catchpoint nodes before we get to an overloaded state. The capacity utilization graph is not a reliable indicator for this metric. How can the capacity utilization rate get above 100%, it does not make sense
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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
we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures
service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level
agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any
network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the
availability and response time service levels
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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
It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.
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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
No answers on this topic
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
The customer support is fantastic as they keep you updated and follow up even though we may not even follow up. Make sure they send a communication so that we remain updated. They value engineers who will get on a call with you to understand any requirement we have on any test, and they bring in the best developers on call.
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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
very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly
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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
Datadog is good, but more expensive. New Relic is good but does not provide the same features as Catchpoint does. Checkly is good, but Catchpoint offers different frameworks to create synthetic tests, which is preferable to my engineering team.
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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
  • Catchpoint points based licensing for public hosted nodes is complicated and unpredictable in points required.
  • Catchpoint lacks AI powered anomaly detection and automated remediation. This gap means more manual triage and slower MTTR during incidents.
  • The advanced 360 degree blackbox monitoring is enabling us to monitor the APIs, UI and proactively gain insights into the application behavior and performance before customer is impacted.
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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.