Why ThousandEyes Matters for MSPs

Picture this: An MSP receives an urgent call about degraded user experiences for a SaaS application that comes with performance guarantees. Perhaps only a sub-set of users are being impacted intermittently, such as those in the Nordic region. How does the MSP identify the root cause if they are blind to the underlying Internet connecting the SaaS application to its users? They can’t, at least not without deploying ThousandEyes.

Delivering exceptional digital experience requires visibility into the network

It’s no secret that to meet business objectives, today’s successful organizations are laser focused on delivering exceptional digital experiences, whether through deployed applications or third-party SaaS.  And as degraded network latency can negatively impact user experiences,companies need visibility into the end-to-end network connectivity supporting their application landscapes.

Increasingly, successful organizations are focusing their limited resources on strategically differentiating their core competencies. This leaves the tactical management of the underlying IT infrastructure — needed to support their applications and remote workers — to managed service providers: the experts in delivering IT services around network, applications, infrastructure, and security, typically with committed SLAs.

Unfortunately, today’s MSPs are challenged to confidently guarantee these SLAs, as more and more of the applications their customers rely on are run over a network they don’t control: the Internet. This leaves a huge visibility gap in ensuring the digital experiences for customers and employees.

This is where Cisco ThousandEyes has become a critical solution for MSPs to close this visibility gap, helping them to further accelerate their customers’ digital transformation no matter where they are in their journeys. MSPs can extend their existing services with ThousandEyes, helping ensure customer applications are running smoothly.

“Cloud providers and the public Internet are now so central to user experience that a Managed Service Provider (MSP)

cannot deliver a world class managed service with service assurance without integrating ThousandEyes.”

– Joe Vaccaro, Head of Product, ThousandEyes

SLA guarantees for SaaS applications

For instance, many MSPs have practices ensuring their customers receive optimal user experiences when running SaaS applications such as Webex® by Cisco, Microsoft 365, and Salesforce. What these three applications have in common is a heavy reliance on the Internet to not only connect with end users, but also with additional web services.

For example, if an MSP receives a support call regarding issues with a Microsoft 365 application such as Outlook, how can the MSP respond given a complete lack of visibility into the Internet? Do they assemble a war room, trying to run a virtual call with a host of stakeholders from NetOps to Microsoft support in a painfully slow attempt to identify where the issue is? Do they just blame “the network” and hope the problem goes away? This is unfortunately how many MSPs are currently forced to approach this type of support call.

With ThousandEyes, the MSP can quickly remediate problems by identifying if the issue is indeed the network, and more importantly whose network, and then point technical support to where the issue is, all with just a few mouse clicks. This greatly reduces the “meantime to innocence” for stakeholders, whose part of the underlying stack is running fine.

Better yet, notifications can be set so the MSP is notified if a problem is potentially on the horizon. This increases the chance of avoiding issues altogether before they impact user experiences.

Out of the box integrations

In addition, Cisco provides out-of-the-box integrations between ThousandEyes and many core Cisco technologies, such as Meraki, Webex, Viptela, Cisco SASE stack, DNA Center and AppDynamics. These integrations simplify deployment and help support teams correlate data from different sources, greatly accelerating remediation efforts.

Further differentiated offering

When an MSP offers ThousandEyes either as a standalone practice or offered as part of an existing practice — such as cloud migration, cloud networking, hybrid work, managed security service or application monitoring — this visibility into the Internet and cloud provider networks becomes an additional differentiator for the MSP. This can completely transform the business, making it easier to win RFPs competing against other MSPs that can’t claim their committed SLAs are supported by the same level of network visibility.

Improve user experiences by reducing the Internet visibility gap

In today’s world of remote workforces and applications built on web services running in hybrid cloud environments, the Internet has become the new network that businesses rely on to deliver optimal customer and employee experiences. Without real-time visibility into the Internet, MSPs are running partially blind while holding SLA commitments to their customers.

How do you get this visibility? Add a ThousandEyes practice to your business or ThousandEyes capabilities to your existing practices.

Interested in learning more? Reach out to your ThousandEyes or Cisco Partner Account Manager to see a demo. Also consider:

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