If you ask three IT professionals what comes to mind when you say “ThousandEyes Internet Insights,” each might give you a different response. One might point to our Internet Outages Map, a real-time visualization of global Internet health that continuously tracks internet outages. Another may reference our popular Internet and Cloud Intelligence Blog, which features a long history of articles covering major Internet outages. Or perhaps they’ll mention how they’re using Internet Insights to understand the impacts of global outages on their own end-users’ digital experiences.
Our deep and broad visibility into Internet performance is based on billions of measurements taken and collected each day to our global platform from tests initiated continuously from thousands of vantage points around the world. The data is correlated algorithmically and presented visually through maps, path visualizations, diagrams, dashboards, and tables. We call this “Collective Intelligence.” It’s foundational to Cisco ThousandEyes, and something that sets us apart from traditional network or application monitoring.
Until now, Internet Insights has used the Collective Intelligence dataset exclusively to detect and understand outages. That’s why we’re excited about Internet Insights Provider Intelligence, a new Internet Insights capability that extends this data to a different set of use cases—finding, comparing, evaluating, and choosing Internet service providers (ISPs) and peering partners.
The Cost of Uncertainty
The current status quo in choosing service providers is fraught with hidden risks. When a network team needs to select a provider for a new location, it first must identify providers that offer services to that location. Getting a “lay of the land” for different locations can take time and get complicated. How, for instance, would a network architect know or find out that a provider who offers service in one location doesn’t offer the same service in another?
Once an eligible set of providers is identified, it can then take months to collect and analyze the data needed to make an informed choice, which can be problematic if the project is on a tight deadline. Synthetic tests can be used to establish baselines and collect performance data; however, deploying and running these tests against multiple providers is time consuming. Online tools offered for this purpose are usually based only on raw throughput or speed over the last mile, not necessarily a reliable indicator of performance over time. Those tools are also based on generalized data and don’t consider the unique requirements of individual organizations or the applications they use.
Consequently, teams are often forced to revert to "gut-level" decisions that are prone to missing the mark. That too can be costly, especially if an unscientifically chosen provider underperforms or experiences persistent service issues or outages that negatively impact business outcomes.
Our customers have shared how they’ve had to rely on incomplete, inaccurate, or biased data, months of synthetic test results compiled into spreadsheets, or opinions collected from on-line networking or Internet-focused communities and social channels. In short, they told us they were looking for a better way to choose service providers. Listening to their experiences and figuring out how to use our data to provide an alternative is how Provider Intelligence came to be.
A New Approach: Data-Driven, Comprehensive, and Extremely Fast
Provider Intelligence starts with ThousandEyes Collective Intelligence. It leverages the same dataset Internet Insights uses to detect global outages, but for proactive "shift left" use cases focused on optimizing cost and digital experiences rather than detection and response to outages.
The data from our platform is what allows organizations to identify and evaluate multiple network providers side-by-side in specific geographies, with no agents to install or tests to configure and manage. In essence, Provider Intelligence is built to address the very issues that have been problematic in identifying, evaluating, and choosing providers. Provider Intelligence offers:
- A simple, intuitive workflow: Initiating a search using Provider Intelligence takes only a few minutes. Simply build a query by choosing a timeframe, and how you want the results calculated. You then select the locations, applications, and/or cloud regions that are relevant to your search. Finally, you rank the performance metrics used to calculate scores in order of importance. Once finished, click “Explore Providers.” Within seconds, you have a list of providers ranked by overall score, generated through the power of Collective Intelligence.
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Instant historical depth: Provider Intelligence gives you access to up to six months of historical data. This allows for immediate trend analysis, helping you understand how a provider has performed over time rather than relying on a single snapshot or taking months to build out spreadsheets.
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Objective performance scores: Provider Intelligence calculates based on a granular set of metrics—end-to-end latency, packet loss, jitter, and time-to-first byte—to assess not just throughput but consistency over time. Its aggregate scoring system simplifies decision-making by combining these metrics into a single, easy-to-read score based on your specific business priorities. Its results panel even indicates how many outages a provider has experienced within the selected timeframe, to further assist your evaluation.
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App-to-network correlation: Provider Intelligence also uniquely compares providers not just on raw metrics, but on how they perform for specific SaaS applications or cloud regions. This helps to align your service provider choice with the actual requirements of your most used applications.
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Stability Metrics: Performance is only half the battle. Provider Intelligence quantifies the consistency of service over time through stability scores, helping you avoid providers who may, for instance, not be as good at delivering latency and jitter-sensitive applications like voice or video.
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Report generation: Keeping key stakeholders informed and up to date is crucial. Provider Intelligence allows you to select the top five performers from search results to generate and share reports. This also preserves at-a-glance visibility into previous searches so that you don’t have to recreate them.
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Additional use cases: In addition to selecting local ISPs, Provider Intelligence can be used to identify and evaluate optimal peering partners for delivering applications to users. It can also be used to negotiate or assess SLA performance with existing providers, with the data you need at your fingertips.
Perhaps the best thing about Provider Intelligence is that if you already have Internet Insights, you already have Provider Intelligence. Just navigate to Internet Insights in ThousandEyes, select Provider Intelligence, and start using it. No strings attached.
Putting it All Together
Consider the example of a global enterprise looking to open new retail locations in or near cities where the Internet landscape is unfamiliar. A network architect can use Provider Intelligence to filter by region and specific business applications. By comparing three local ISPs side-by-side over the last six months, the team can identify in a few clicks that while one provider offers the lowest latency, it suffers from high packet loss and poor application response. The architect can then, with the support of key decision makers, select a provider that offers a better balance of stability and performance, helping to support a smooth store launch and optimal experiences for end-users.
By shifting the approach away from biased claims and manual spreadsheets toward automated, objective, data-driven evaluation, Provider Intelligence can help teams build more resilient, high-performing networks that are cost-optimized. It reduces time-to-value for new site deployments and serves as an objective tool when negotiating with service providers.
But Provider Intelligence is not just a tool; it represents a shift in how organizations can make network and infrastructure decisions, using data rather than guesswork and built around organizational priorities and preferences rather than generalized comparisons. By taking a “know before you buy” approach, Provider Intelligence helps you make network decisions that are as robust as the applications your networks support.
If you’re not already an Internet Insights customer and want to learn more about Provider Intelligence or see it in action, you can request a demo or a free trial.
You can also watch this tutorial video to see first-hand how it works.
Performance metrics provided by Provider Intelligence are based on aggregated historical data and are for informational purposes only. Cisco does not guarantee specific network performance or service levels.
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