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Diagnosing network issues was once a relatively straightforward task. IT teams monitored on-premises infrastructure, controlled the routing environment, and relied on static connectivity models. But that simplicity no longer exists. Today’s enterprise networks are highly decentralised, spanning internet service providers, third-party SaaS platforms, SD-WAN overlays, and multiple cloud environments. And most of these components lie completely outside the organisation’s control.
This growing complexity has introduced a new problem: visibility gaps. When a user complains about slow Microsoft 365 performance or a critical app goes down, the root cause could be anywhere—from a regional ISP outage to a misrouted BGP path or an issue within the SaaS provider itself. Without real-time, end-to-end observability across these layers, IT teams are often left guessing. That’s where ThousandEyes comes in.
This blog deep dives into how ThousandEyes helps IT teams cut through the complexity, and answers some key questions like:
- Why do traditional monitoring tools fall short in cloud-first environments?
- How does ThousandEyes identify root causes across ISPs, SaaS, and cloud.
- What does real-time network path visualisation mean for troubleshooting?
- How a Managed ThousandEyes service simplifies operations and reduces time to resolution.
What makes network connectivity troubleshooting so challenging today?
Legacy monitoring tools were built for a simpler world—one where IT teams had full control over servers, switches, and firewalls. But the reality today is entirely different. Enterprise networks have evolved into distributed ecosystems involving third-party ISPs, SaaS applications, public cloud providers, remote users, and SD-WAN overlays. And the more external services an organisation relies on, the harder it becomes to troubleshoot network connectivity issues.
Consider a typical digital transaction. Data might travel from a user’s device on a home ISP to a corporate firewall, then through a cloud-hosted application that connects to APIs in another region. Along the way, multiple handoffs occur across networks outside the business’s direct control. If latency spikes or the service fails, IT teams often have no way to determine where the problem occurred—or whether they can do anything about it.
This visibility gap is not an isolated concern. A report found that 81% of IT professionals cite visibility into SaaS and cloud environments as their top network challenge (source). The lack of correlation between user complaints and available telemetry creates operational blind spots, delays resolution, and frustrates stakeholders.
To effectively diagnose network issues, businesses need a monitoring strategy that accounts for the entire digital supply chain—not just what’s within their data centre walls.
What is ThousandEyes monitoring and how does it work?
ThousandEyes is a digital experience observability platform powered by Cisco, designed to provide full visibility into internet paths, SaaS platforms, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise networks—all from the end-user perspective.
Unlike conventional monitoring tools that focus on internal performance metrics, ThousandEyes is “internet-aware”. It tracks every step in the delivery path, from local ISP to global transit provider, and from SaaS frontend to cloud backend. Using synthetic testing and real-time path visualisation, it reveals bottlenecks, outages, and routing anomalies that affect digital performance.
Core features include:
- Visual mapping of all network hops across ISP, cloud, and SaaS providers
- Correlation of application performance with network and routing data
- Alerting based on both symptoms and root cause
Data is collected through three primary vantage points:
- Cloud-based agents hosted in global locations for benchmarking performance
- Enterprise agents deployed on-premises or on Cisco devices
- Endpoint agents running on laptops, enabling visibility for remote or hybrid workers
Diagnosing network issues with ThousandEyes: A layered approach
ThousandEyes goes beyond surface-level metrics. It allows IT teams to diagnose network issues by tracing digital performance across multiple interdependent layers—network infrastructure, internet routing, application delivery, and cloud services. Here’s how it enables granular troubleshooting across these domains:
Detecting ISP-Level Performance Degradation
ThousandEyes monitors internet transit paths and reveals performance degradation at the ISP level, even when it occurs outside the enterprise network. If there’s a drop in throughput, packet loss, or increased jitter due to upstream provider issues, the platform visualises the exact point of failure.
For example, a multinational business might experience intermittent Microsoft 365 outages in its regional office. ThousandEyes could competently identify the root cause as a Tier 1 ISP routing issue affecting regional traffic, a problem that standard monitoring tools couldn’t detect.
For IT teams trying to troubleshoot network connectivity issues in highly distributed environments, this level of insight is essential.
Monitoring SaaS Application Experience
SaaS platforms are often outside IT’s visibility but remain mission critical. ThousandEyes continuously monitors SaaS apps such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace from various user locations, offering insight into user experience across geographies.
For example, a KSA-based enterprise experienced delays in Salesforce login times. While internal systems were performing normally, ThousandEyes pinpointed degraded peering at the cloud provider’s regional gateway—enabling the team to escalate with confidence and save hours of blind troubleshooting.
With SaaS adoption only increasing, this capability to diagnose network issues tied to application delivery is crucial for ensuring a consistent digital experience.
Cloud Service Path Monitoring (AWS, Azure, GCP)
As workloads shift to cloud-native platforms, understanding how traffic flows between users and cloud endpoints becomes vital. ThousandEyes provides path analysis between enterprise sites and cloud regions, highlighting the impact of BGP routing decisions, cloud ingress latency, or misconfigured services.
Another example showcasing ThousandEyes performance and capability, a fintech app hosted in Azure’s West Europe region experienced sudden latency spikes. ThousandEyes revealed that a public internet route was redirecting traffic via an unnecessarily distant PoP—resulting in a suboptimal experience for users in the Middle East.
This real-time visibility helps teams troubleshoot network connectivity issues faster and optimise cloud application performance.
BGP and Route Analysis
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) forms the backbone of internet routing but is notoriously opaque. ThousandEyes visualises BGP advertisements and detects anomalies such as route hijacks, propagation delays, and misconfigurations.
This capability is especially important for businesses with their own ASN or those relying on services like IP Transit. For example, an enterprise running latency-sensitive applications across regions could use ThousandEyes to identify an incorrect upstream route advertisement that diverts critical traffic unnecessarily impacting both speed and reliability.
By integrating routing awareness into its toolkit, ThousandEyes allows enterprises to diagnose network issues at the protocol layer—something traditional NMS platforms cannot offer.
Real-Time alerts and actionable insights with ThousandEyes
One of the most powerful aspects of ThousandEyes is its intelligent alerting engine, designed not just to notify but to inform. Alerts are based on symptoms and context—not just simple metrics like ping loss or uptime checks.
Each alert comes with an embedded path visualisation and root cause summary, enabling teams to act faster and with greater precision. Instead of escalating every issue or guessing at the source, IT can quickly validate whether the issue is within their network, an upstream ISP, or the SaaS provider.
For example, a regional outage affecting Microsoft Teams in Abu Dhabi triggered real-time alerts from ThousandEyes, pinpointing the issue to a backbone provider upstream from the ISP—allowing the IT team to take informed action and update stakeholders early.
NOC teams also benefit from intuitive visual dashboards that transform complex routing behaviour into understandable data flows. This reduces the noise and enables response teams to focus only on actionable anomalies—ultimately cutting Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and improving service assurance.
In a world where every second counts, ThousandEyes turns reactive firefighting into proactive incident management.
Powering performance with Orixcom Managed Cisco ThousandEyes
While ThousandEyes offers powerful observability features, managing the platform internally can be resource-intensive—especially for enterprises without a dedicated NOC or network analytics team. That’s where Orixcom’s Network Managed Services powered by Cisco ThousandEyes delivers value.
Orixcom simplifies ThousandEyes adoption by offering it as a fully managed solution. This includes:
- End-to-end setup and configuration across cloud, on-premises, and remote vantage points
- Continuous monitoring of application and network performance
- Real-time alert triage and incident investigation
- Monthly insights and recommendations to enhance network health and visibility
This managed model makes it easy for businesses of all sizes to unlock the full power of ThousandEyes without needing in-house expertise. It also complements Orixcom’s broader portfolio—working seamlessly with Managed IP Transit, SD-WAN, and DIA solutions.
Whether you're troubleshooting Microsoft 365 latency, investigating intermittent API failures, or just looking to reduce MTTR, Orixcom enables you to act with confidence—backed by continuous visibility across your full digital estate.
Use cases across industries
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Retail Chains: Diagnosing Regional Slowdowns
A major retail chain noticed frequent delays in POS transactions during peak hours across multiple stores in the UAE. Local IT checks showed no internal bottlenecks. ThousandEyes revealed packet loss on a regional ISP node affecting payment gateway access—information the provider had not yet acknowledged. This insight helped the retailer escalate the issue and reroute traffic temporarily, avoiding revenue loss during high-traffic periods.
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Law Firms & Financial Services: SaaS Performance Issues
A global law firm based in Dubai experienced a wave of client complaints about delayed Outlook emails and slow access to shared documents. Initial assumptions blamed internal bandwidth limits. However, ThousandEyes monitoring showed a degraded connection to Microsoft 365’s regional tenant caused by a transient SaaS provider issue—unreported at the time. This allowed the firm to proactively communicate with users and prevent IT from wasting time investigating non-existent internal faults.
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Cloud-First Startups: Latency Between Regions
A tech startup operating across Europe and the Middle East noticed that latency-sensitive APIs were becoming unstable. Using ThousandEyes, they discovered that BGP routing changes were causing eastbound traffic to be routed through North America. The startup was able to adjust its cloud peering strategy and avoid unnecessary routing loops.
Conclusion
In an era where user experience, uptime, and digital agility define competitive advantage, visibility is no longer optional—it’s essential. Traditional monitoring tools, designed for on-premises environments, simply can’t keep pace with the cloud-first, SaaS-heavy networks most organisations now depend on.
ThousandEyes monitoring gives IT teams the ability to finally see beyond their internal network—to understand what’s happening across the internet, cloud platforms, SaaS environments, and ISP transit paths. It bridges the gap between user complaints and root cause analysis, enabling teams to act on facts, not assumptions.
From identifying ISP-related latency to diagnosing SaaS disruptions, ThousandEyes shifts IT operations from reactive firefighting to proactive service assurance. But technology alone isn’t enough. Implementation, ongoing optimisation, and real-time analysis require time and expertise.
That’s why Orixcom Managed Cisco ThousandEyes is not just a service or a platform, but the intelligence, support, and contextual insight required to make every alert meaningful and every response fast. Combined with our expertise in solutions like SD-WAN, IP Transit, and DIA, the result is a resilient digital infrastructure optimised for performance and end to end visibility.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1. How is ThousandEyes different from other network monitoring tools?
- Most traditional network monitoring tools are limited to observing internal infrastructure—servers, routers, and firewalls within your own environment. ThousandEyes, on the other hand, is designed for the modern enterprise, offering visibility well beyond the corporate perimeter. It provides real-time monitoring across the internet, cloud service providers, SaaS platforms, and ISP networks. This makes it uniquely capable of identifying issues in third-party environments that typical tools cannot reach, helping IT teams pinpoint the actual root cause of service degradation, no matter where it occurs.
Q2. Can I use ThousandEyes even if I don’t manage my own BGP routing?
- Yes, ThousandEyes is valuable for all types of organisations, regardless of whether they manage their own BGP advertisements. While BGP route visualisation is a powerful feature—particularly for businesses with IP Transit or an Autonomous System Number (ASN)—you don’t need to operate at that level to benefit. ThousandEyes also monitors end-to-end application performance, ISP transit paths, and cloud/SaaS delivery, providing full visibility for IT teams with limited control over routing infrastructure.
Q3. Does Orixcom provide deployment and support for ThousandEyes?
- Yes, Orixcom offers ThousandEyes as a fully managed service, handling everything from initial setup and configuration to ongoing monitoring, alert management, and periodic performance reporting. This managed model removes operational complexity and ensures that customers always get the most value out of the platform—with expert guidance and timely insights to support fast, effective troubleshooting.
Q4. Can I monitor SaaS applications with ThousandEyes?
- Yes, ThousandEyes is specifically built to monitor SaaS application performance from multiple user locations. It tracks services like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Google Workspace, and more—offering deep visibility into latency, availability, and network paths. This helps IT teams determine whether performance issues are caused by the SaaS provider, internet transit, or internal bottlenecks, significantly improving response times and user satisfaction.
Q5. Can ThousandEyes be used to monitor remote and hybrid users?
- Yes, ThousandEyes supports monitoring of remote and hybrid users through lightweight endpoint agents installed on laptops or workstations. These agents provide visibility into the local ISP connection, home network conditions, and the entire path to cloud or SaaS services. This is especially valuable for organisations with a distributed workforce, as it helps IT teams differentiate between local access issues and broader service-level disruptions. Whether users are working from home, travelling, or connected via VPN, ThousandEyes ensures their digital experience can be monitored and optimised.
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