Managed Assurance: Transforming Digital Experience with ThousandEyes on Meraki MX

In today's technology landscape, ensuring reliable connectivity and peak performance for enterprise networks is increasingly challenging. With applications and services originating from outside your customer's organization, partners need assistance in maintaining network performance and diagnosing issues as they arise. As managed services partners, your role in maintaining optimal digital experiences for clients is more critical than ever. Cisco's integration of ThousandEyes with Meraki MX offers a robust solution to meet these demands. This integration has the potential to significantly enhance your service offerings, revolutionizing the way you deliver and manage digital experiences for your clients. Let's explore how your organization can achieve this.

The Power of ThousandEyes on Meraki MX for an MSP

As you know, Meraki MX is used as a collector to provide information to the Meraki Insight visibility solutions. So why bother with Thousand Eyes? It is essential to differentiate between passive and active monitoring. Insight primarily focusing on monitoring and troubleshooting within the Meraki network. In other words, it tells you how is the customer experience at that very right moment. Instead, ThousandEyes extends your visibility from the WAN to the App, helping you quickly determine whether problems arise from the SD-WAN/MPLS connection, the SaaS application, DNS, ISP, or the cloud provider. The combination of both solutions is a powerful tool to enhance the customer experience with proactive 24/7 monitoring.

For more details on ThousandEyes, you can revisit our previous blog, "Maximize Managed Services: Cisco ThousandEyes Drives MSPs Towards Outstanding Client Experiences."

[Link]Seeing the big picture, the power of have Meraki Insight with Thousand Eyes

With ThousandEyes on Meraki MX, you can instantly activate monitoring at scale and continuously monitor network performance. This capability reduces the operational burden on your team and provides IT admins with real-time insights into application health and network status. Having this Enterprise Agent running natively on your Meraki MX offers the MSP the following three advantages:

1. Easy Deployment and Management

Deploying ThousandEyes on Meraki MX is straightforward. Enterprise agents can be deployed to MX67 devices and above, running a minimum firmware version of 18.104. The Meraki Dashboard facilitates one-click enrollment, simplifying the setup process. This integration leverages ThousandEyes test templates to monitor popular SaaS applications, providing continuous visibility and reducing operational workloads.

There's no need to deal with the complexities of installing, operating, and maintaining other enterprise agents running on virtual machines in the customer network. You can activate them with a few clicks from your Meraki Dashboard and get the proper credentials for your customer organization.

[Link]Simplified Workflow to enable ThousandEyes Agents on MX

2. Proactive Issue Resolution

The integration of ThousandEyes with Meraki MX devices enables proactive monitoring of network and application performance. This solution allows IT teams to detect and remediate issues before they spread, ensuring optimal performance and user experience. Leveraging ThousandEyes to your current Meraki WAN services you can rapidly identify and address issues impacting SaaS applications and other critical services across every branch site. This proactive approach helps maintain high levels of service availability and performance, reducing the need for manual interventions and administrative overhead.

[Link]This is an example of proactive resolution, during the investigation of a performance issue you can see how many users are affected for the same app and proactively can communicate the issue and workarounds to the other users.

3. Simplified App Management

The Meraki App Platform ensures that ThousandEyes updates are delivered seamlessly, minimizing disruptions. Containers provide isolation and limit resources, ensuring stability and performance. This package-centric approach simplifies support and maintenance, allowing you to focus on delivering exceptional service.

Meeting requirements and optimizing licensing model

First, considering the Meraki side of the equation, the first milestone is to ensure that your customer meets the hardware and license requirements. You can run this ThousandEyes agent on Meraki MX67 and up models with Meraki Advanced Security or Meraki Secure SDWAN+ licenses.

Let's pause for a second to review Thousand Eyes licensing. ThousandEyes offers a flexible licensing model tailored for Managed Service Providers (MSPs). The model is structured around the three main types of agents: Cloud, Enterprise, and Endpoint Agents. Consumption depends on the type of agents and the types of tests executed.

Returning to the offering, ThousandEyes uses a tiered unit consumption model, where different test types (e.g., HTTP server tests, network tests, Web layer tests, etc.) consume varying numbers of units. The frequency and complexity of tests affect the unit consumption. This model allows MSPs to scale their monitoring capabilities according to client needs, manage costs effectively, and offer customized, high-value services.

A good starting point is to gather the last month's tickets received and average the root cause analysis. Then, review the resolution times and the steps performed, and cross-reference them with the available tests. You will soon find ways to build your unique tier offering, adding customer value and improving your NOC operational process.

Transform your managed services with ThousandEyes and Meraki MX

Integrating ThousandEyes with Meraki MX is a game-changer for managed services partners. It provides comprehensive visibility, proactive monitoring, and seamless management, enabling you to deliver superior digital experiences for your clients. By leveraging this powerful combination, you can enhance your service offerings, reduce downtime, and ensure optimal network and application performance.

Stay ahead of the curve and empower your clients with the best network and application monitoring. Embrace the future with ThousandEyes on Meraki MX and transform your managed services today.

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Managed Services Voice of the Engineer

Additional information

Visit the Cisco Partner Managed Services SalesConnect page for recordings of previous MS VoE sessions.

Check out more Managed Services Blogs and the implementation guide for more details about this integration.

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