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ThousandEyes on Cisco Meraki: Enhanced Visibility Across Internet and SaaS Dependencies

By Jillian Murphy
| | 5 min read

Summary

Today, we’re introducing ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents on Cisco Meraki MX hardware, enriching network diagnostics and ensuring a more reliable digital experience for users.


Increasing connectivity driven by SaaS applications, third-party services, and network growth, introduces complexity and heightens the risk of disruptions. For IT operations teams, ensuring a seamless digital experience is like executing a perfect dance: timing and coordination are key. Networks, much like dancers, need flawless synchronization to keep information flowing. But as enterprises increasingly turn to cloud and Internet services for speed and scalability, the “choreography” gets more complicated. This poses a delicate balance for IT teams, who must maintain quality experiences while grappling with limited visibility and control of environments that their users rely on.

ThousandEyes addresses critical blind spots—such as Internet, SaaS, and cloud—that are frequently the largest portion of the service delivery chain, providing intelligent visibility into your network traffic's journey across the Internet and ensuring no missteps go unnoticed. We present actionable insights—correlating application performance, BGP routing, and Layer 3 network hops with metrics such as packet loss, latency, and jitter—to equip IT teams with the ability to rapidly identify problems and opportunities to optimize. Our proactive monitoring allows IT teams to simulate user digital experience, resolving issues before they impact end users.

Today, we’re introducing ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents on Cisco Meraki MX hardware. Organizations can now achieve in-depth visibility and insights into SaaS performance and underlying network health, empowering operations teams to see, understand, and act on issues affecting both users and sites across their SD-WAN environment. This native integration gives access to enhanced monitoring for distributed, lean IT sites without the need for additional hardware.

Streamlining Network Operations and Troubleshooting

From the Meraki dashboard, network teams can quickly mass-activate ThousandEyes agents on MX devices and deploy ThousandEyes active monitoring tests using intuitive, pre-configured templates for common SaaS applications. This integration broadens ThousandEyes' network path and performance visibility from each MX site, enabling IT teams to identify and rectify issues, reduce downtime, and maintain connectivity for key business processes.

Watch the demo below to see how the integration works.

ThousandEyes proactive visibility is critical for operations teams to quickly address issues that may impact revenue and customer experience. Consider a retail chain on Black Friday, a critical time when network latency can trigger point-of-sale system failures and cascade into customer dissatisfaction and lost sales. Using ThousandEyes on Meraki, IT teams can pinpoint the exact cause of the disruption, whether it's due to a saturated local network or a wider Internet outage. This clarity enables swift remedial actions, such as implementing a standby circuit or changing service providers, to uphold uninterrupted transaction processes and sales momentum during this crucial time. 

Similarly, in healthcare, server connectivity issues at remote clinics can block access to electronic health records, directly impeding patient services. ThousandEyes and Meraki together facilitate rapid root-cause identification, discerning if they stem from internal misconfigurations or external network failures. This immediate insight empowers IT professionals to optimize network paths and configurations, thereby securing consistent and stable access to vital healthcare applications and data.

A Simple, Proactive Solution

Integrating ThousandEyes on Cisco Meraki MX enriches network diagnostics for its users, ensuring a more reliable digital experience. Organizations can now proactively manage networks outside of their domain from their existing network infrastructure, accelerating problem-solving and bolstering operational efficiency, which can lower operational costs and reduce downtime.

We’re excited to bring this integration to Meraki MX users. Those with an Advanced Security or SD-WAN Plus license, including trial accounts, can now activate ThousandEyes directly through the Meraki dashboard.


To learn more about leveraging ThousandEyes’ enhanced visibility across your Meraki MX deployment, check out our documentation here.

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