Cisco Catalyst 9000 switches integrated with ThousandEyes for network visibility

Today we are going to discuss about the integration of Cisco Catalyst 9000 series switches with ThousandEyes (newly acquired by Cisco). 

Before we are going to talk about the ThousandEyes integration, we would like to discuss about thousand eyes in brief.

What is ThousandEyes?
Thousand Eyes is a next generation software defined solution which analyzes the performance of LAN, WAN and cloud-based infrastructure and provide end to end visibility of traffic and path.

ThousandEyes Monitoring provides a platform to see and understand underlying dependencies along the digital supply chain that impact end user experience. So the main focus is the customer experience whether customer deployed and use ThousandEyes in LAN, WAN and Cloud as we discuss earlier.

Cisco Catalyst integration with ThousandEyes
Cisco Catalyst 9300 and 9400 switches with ThousandEyes provides us with visibility into the next generation experience of Branch/Campus users connecting to any application over any network. 

With the help of ThousandEyes, we can visualize detailed network paths and metrics between Branch/Campus and the critical SaaS and cloud-based services.

Fig 1.1- ThousandEyes Dashboard

What licenses required to enable ThousandEyes in the Campus network on Cisco Catalyst 9000 devices?
Cisco Catalyst 9000 series customers with a DNA Advantage or Premier subscription will have the ThousandEyes Enterprise Agent natively supported on the switch IOS XE in flash.

So, if you are a new customer and going to buy Cisco Catalyst 9000 series switches (9300/9400) you will get that shipped with the DNA Advantage and Premier subscription package.

If you are already have Cisco Catalyst 9000 series switch with DNA Advantage and Premier subscription, you need to check Software subscription on the Cisco software portal and the request will be generated and redirected to ThousandEyes, by which you will get the portal access and the subscription for the ThousandEyes to use.

As Cisco acquired ThousandEyes, the main purpose of the acquisition is to give more benefits to the customers who has adoption towards Cloud and SaaS and will help to ease the visibility across the network end to end  Internet and Cloud Intelligence for the Catalyst 9000 will deliver critical visibility and actionable insights to organizations so they can take back control of their experience of external dependencies they don’t own and, ultimately, thrive in a connected world.