Cisco ThousandEyes vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

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.

Incentivized

Pingdom is well suited to monitor any of your public facing IPs, so you receive an alert by text message or email when the IP you are monitoring does not respond for a given length of time, from an impressive 10ms to 30s. This allows you to be pretty granular with the alerting. It's less appropriate for monitoring IPs on your LAN, unless you NAT these through your firewall.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Alerting, particularly the integration with PagerDuty.
• Reporting: the ability to go back and view the history of each status check (including details about every failure) as well as graphs and reports over a longer time period.
• Weekly uptime report emails are very convenient.
• Programmatic configuration is possible with a third-party Terraform plugin.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• sometimes sends false alerts
• there should be some threshold value for when an application is not reachable, it should alert after 30 seconds and keep sending hello packets for those 30 seconds and if still there is no response, then it should send the alert.
• too many unwanted metrics.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

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.

Incentivized

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Being cloud hosted means that you are at the mercy of Cisco web services, but we've had absolutely no issues with its availability.

Incentivized

The client is very lightweight on endpoints and the user interface is very fast and fluid.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

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.

Incentivized

Customer service from Solarwinds has always been stellar. We've never gone unnoticed, even though we're currently within their tail segment. They're a great partner to us and indeed an important one. When we've had to submit a ticket, we've always received a response within 24 hours. I'd highly recommend SolarWinds to any organization with a server network

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We have only used Pingdom for these needs, so I can't speak directly to competitors. That being said, for the reasons we used Pingdom it was fantastic value and the fact we never bothered to look for a competitor speaks volumes about our satisfaction with the product.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Our client has continued to use our services
• It has helped our organisation keep up to date about any site traffic fluctuations and help us make educated decisions on appropriate server resources for the site
• The service is relatively inexpensive making it easy to cost into our maintenance charges

Incentivized