ThousandEyes is an online platform that shows how a website, a SaaS application or a cloud service actually reaches the people using it, hop by hop across every network along the way. According to Wikipedia, the company was started in 2010 by Mohit Lad and Ricardo Oliveira, who had worked together at the Internet Research Lab at UCLA. Cisco closed its acquisition on 7 August 2020, and the service has been sold as Cisco ThousandEyes ever since.
This proprietary, subscription-based service runs in a browser and relies on agents that customers can deploy on Linux servers or employee laptops.
What ThousandEyes is for
A company that runs its email on Microsoft 365, its sales pipeline on Salesforce and its meetings on Webex depends on dozens of networks it does not own. When staff complain that things are slow, internal monitoring often shows nothing but green lights, because the fault lies with a transit carrier or a DNS provider. ThousandEyes tries to make those outside networks as readable as the corporate one.
To do so, it runs scheduled tests from three kinds of vantage point. Cloud Agents are operated by Cisco and, according to an official platform overview, sit in nearly 200 cities, inside access providers and the major public clouds. Enterprise Agents are deployed by the customer in branch offices or data centres. Endpoint Agents run on employees’ laptops and capture what each person experiences, including from a home broadband connection.
Tests range from a plain HTTP request to a scripted transaction that logs into an application like a real user would, with DNS checks, voice over IP measurements and BGP monitoring in between. The best known view is path visualisation, which draws every hop between agent and target with its latency and packet loss, so an engineer can point at the network responsible. Internet Insights pools data from every customer to flag outages at major carriers as they happen.
Compared with LibreNMS, which sits in the same category of our software library, the angle is quite different. LibreNMS polls the devices you own over SNMP to report their health and interface load. ThousandEyes looks beyond the firewall, where SNMP tells you nothing at all. Its closest rival is Catchpoint, built on the same distributed agent model, whereas Kentik starts from the NetFlow records exported by routers.
Who is it for?
The service is aimed at large companies and public bodies that run on SaaS, teams operating an SD-WAN, and help desks trying to work out why a remote employee keeps dropping out of calls. Cisco shops get an extra benefit, because the agent can run directly on some Catalyst switches, routers and Meraki MX appliances.
The main limits are financial. There is no permanent free tier, and the unit model, based on the number, type and frequency of tests, makes bills hard to forecast. Cisco’s ordering guide sets a minimum term of twelve months. Nor does it replace internal monitoring of servers and the local network. For a small business infrastructure, self-hosted tools such as LibreNMS or ntopng are a better fit.
Download ThousandEyes safely
Nothing needs downloading to get started. Sign-up happens on thousandeyes.com, which offers a 15-day free trial, and the pricing page says no credit card is needed. Prices are negotiated with Cisco or a partner. Agents are then fetched from inside the web app. The Enterprise Agent ships as a package for Ubuntu, Red Hat and its derivatives or Amazon Linux 2023, as a Docker container on a Linux host and as a virtual appliance for VMware ESXi, VirtualBox or Hyper-V, the only option on Windows and macOS. The Endpoint Agent comes as an MSI for Windows 10 and later and as a package for the three most recent major releases of macOS.
Every agent is tied to an account through a token or connection string unique to the customer, so an installer picked up from a third-party download site would be useless as well as risky. Official documentation lives at docs.thousandeyes.com, and the vendor’s public repositories, including a Terraform provider, sit under the thousandeyes account on GitHub.
Frequently asked questions
Is ThousandEyes free?
No. It is sold as an annual subscription on a quote basis. A 15-day free trial is available from the vendor’s site, and Cisco’s ordering guide lists a separate 60-day trial for the Traffic Insights module.
How does it differ from Catchpoint?
Both services measure Internet performance from agents spread around the world and on users’ machines. ThousandEyes benefits from tight integration with Cisco hardware. Catchpoint, now part of LogicMonitor, claims more than 3,000 agents and owns the WebPageTest tool.
Do I have to install an agent?
Not necessarily. Cisco’s Cloud Agents are enough to test a public website from the outside. Enterprise and endpoint agents become necessary once you want to measure what your own offices and staff really experience.
