In the fast-paced world of network operations, every second counts. Your teams need to move from detecting an issue to resolving it with speed and accuracy.
That's why we’re thrilled to announce a new capability for the Cisco AI Assistant, an innovation designed to help NetOps teams move faster during critical moments. Introducing Views Explanations for Network and Application Synthetics Tests, created to supercharge your ThousandEyes workflow and equip you to tackle some of the toughest challenges in network operations head-on:
- Accelerating root cause clarity by drastically reducing the time it takes to understand the scope and source of an issue
- Reducing misdiagnosis of issues by preserving and presenting the context behind events and metrics
- Expanding impact across the team by making complex insights accessible to L1 and L2 support, empowering them to act quickly and route incidents to the right experts
With Cisco AI Assistant embedded directly into ThousandEyes, Views Explanations turns complex telemetry into plain-language reasoning you can trust, so every engineer, at every level, can move faster and resolve issues with confidence.
And to further empower NetOps teams, we’ve also created another valuable tool within the Cisco AI Assistant: Account Health Check, which makes it easy to proactively optimize your monitoring environment so it’s ready when you need it the most.
Let's dive into how the Cisco AI Assistant integrated into ThousandEyes makes all this possible.
From Data to Diagnosis in Seconds: Meet Views Explanations
ThousandEyes delivers deep visibility, capturing the various hops, paths, and metrics across your digital ecosystem. That depth of telemetry generates a massive, intricate dataset, giving NetOps teams a rich view of performance. And now, with the Views Explanations capability in the Cisco AI Assistant, NetOps teams can take advantage of these insights faster than ever before. The Cisco AI Assistant’s reasoning model processes the vast ThousandEyes dataset and transforms it into clear, actionable insights, right within the Views page. Instead of simply summarizing information, this reasoning model is purpose-built to analyze, correlate, and explain complex relationships across tests, agents, network paths, and applications. What once might have required manually stitching together metrics and hypotheses can now be understood in seconds, with a single click, giving NetOps teams the clarity they need when and where it matters most.
The experience is incredibly simple:
1. In the Views timeline, select a test round. In the example video below, we'll use one that has an alert showing in the red swim lane that requires investigation.
2. Click the “Explain Selection” button.
3. Instantly, the Cisco AI Assistant analyzes all relevant data—including network, application, and BGP test metrics; detailed network paths; and event detection—to deliver a precise fault domain isolation.
4. You can use follow-up prompts to get a more detailed explanation of how the Cisco AI Assistant arrived at the fault domain assessment, providing transparency into ThousandEyes’ intelligence.
5. Also use follow-up prompts to investigate how this might affect a particular location or agent or just to learn more about the issue itself.
Figure 1. A user selects a red-flagged round in Views and clicks "Explain Selection" to get an instant analysis
To start, this powerful fault domain analysis is available for our most popular test types:
- Agent-to-Server Tests for network layer analysis
- HTTP Server Tests for application layer analysis
- Page Load Tests for comprehensive web performance analysis
We’ll continue to add support for more test types as we enhance this feature.
To provide even more context and truly understand the evolution of an issue, you can also select adjacent test rounds for a valuable comparative analysis. This is crucial for identifying what has changed between different observations and helps you quickly understand if an issue is a recurring problem, a new anomaly, or a single, isolated incident. By baselining performance against previous and subsequent tests, you can better isolate the underlying cause and track its progression, moving beyond a snapshot to a full narrative of your network's health.
Figure 2. A user selects multiple adjacent rounds to perform a comparative analysis
Proactive Monitoring Assurance: Introducing Account Health Check
As digital ecosystems grow, so does the challenge of maintaining operational hygiene for your monitoring environment. At scale, helping ensure every test is configured, every agent is online, and every critical alert is active requires constant vigilance. Even a minor configuration drift can create potential blind spots in your visibility.
To empower you to proactively manage the health of your ThousandEyes deployment, we’re also introducing Account Health Check.
Simply open the Cisco AI Assistant in the ThousandEyes platform and ask it what you need to know:
- "Are any of my Enterprise Agents offline or overloaded?"
- “Do any of my Enterprise Agents have errors?
The Cisco AI Assistant will immediately return a prioritized summary with clear recommendations. No more manual audits or hunting for misconfigurations. Just a clear, efficient path to a healthier, more reliable monitoring environment.
Figure 3. Account Health Check in action
This is just the beginning. We are continuing to evolve Account Health Check to deliver modular insights across all aspects of your deployment, from tests and agents to alerts and consumption, providing context-aware recommendations tailored to your needs.
A New Era of AI-assisted Operations
These two features, Views Explanations and Account Health Check, work in concert to elevate your entire operational workflow.
- Views Explanations helps you react faster than ever, dramatically reducing Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) by providing instant answers directly within your troubleshooting workflow.
- Account Health Check allows you to be proactive, helping ensure your monitoring foundation is solid so you can operate with the confidence that your ThousandEyes deployment is always optimized.
Whether you're in the heat of an investigation or checking that your environment is perfectly set up, the Cisco AI Assistant is there to help.
We invite you to explore these new capabilities in ThousandEyes today. We look forward to your feedback as we continue to build the future of AI-assisted operations.