

Microsoft System Center and ThousandEyes compete in the IT management software category. ThousandEyes appears to have the upper hand in network monitoring due to its comprehensive insights and application visibility, while Microsoft System Center excels in integration within Microsoft environments.
Features: Microsoft System Center offers seamless integration with Microsoft products, antivirus administration, and robust OS upgrade capabilities. ThousandEyes provides end-to-end network monitoring, application visibility, and integration with Cisco products, focusing on deep insights into network paths and ISPs.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft System Center needs better integration with non-Microsoft environments, improved third-party compatibility, and clearer documentation. ThousandEyes requires enhanced network device monitoring, better application-level insights, and improved integration with non-Cisco platforms.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft System Center primarily offers on-premises deployment, with customer support sometimes being slow and expensive. ThousandEyes provides a mix of on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments, with support feedback being generally less complicated compared to Microsoft.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft System Center's pricing is high, as it is usually part of broader enterprise subscriptions, offering substantial ROI through automation. ThousandEyes is considered expensive, with pricing justified by its value in providing large-scale network insights.
There has been a great ROI from using ThousandEyes, with significant time saved in troubleshooting as I can quickly pinpoint issues rather than spending time isolating them, alongside enhancing customer feedback and experience.
I have seen a return on investment by reducing troubleshooting time and having lesser user mapping error issues, in addition to engineering time saved through better observability and reduced organizational MTTR.
As a partner, I cannot create a ticket directly; I have to involve the end user's email to create one, so using the Software Assurance ID to create a ticket directly is not possible, making it very challenging for me.
We contacted the support team, and they resolved it within a couple of hours.
The customer support for ThousandEyes is very proactive and supportive.
Microsoft System Center is scalable, allowing integration even if I have different sites.
Scalability with ThousandEyes is straightforward as you don't really need to scale; it's designed to monitor multiple applications, accommodating 50 or 100 applications simultaneously.
ThousandEyes's scalability is excellent; it is very scalable and grows with my organization's needs.
From my experience, ThousandEyes has been stable up to 95%; I have not seen any stability issues.
ThousandEyes is not very stable; sometimes you have to reboot the servers to get actual results.
The disadvantage of Microsoft System Center is related to the many integrated services; if one service is failing, then all features will be affected.
Incidents should be alerted on and traced early, before they escalate to full outages.
Introduction of a free version for end-users and enhancements to the user interface for easier navigation.
ThousandEyes definitely has differentiators versus the peers in the space.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been that everything was cost-effective.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it comes in cheaper than alternatives.
In Microsoft System Center, all the features are integrated already, whereas in ManageEngine, you have to license each feature individually to access those features.
ThousandEyes offers the best features including global internet and cloud visibility from distributed vantage points, application and network performance monitoring, real-time outage detection and incident alerts, end-to-end path visualization for rapid troubleshooting, proactive issue demarcation, and historical data.
ThousandEyes has become critical for swift network troubleshooting as well, so anytime that there's potential issues with applications or we want to be proactive in resolving potential issues before they arise, ThousandEyes is really the platform that we're leveraging for WAN monitoring, Wi-Fi, latency, packet loss, etc.
With ThousandEyes being able to detect and monitor this, it's fantastic for me. It reduces the workload and also reduces errors in trying to figure out where there is internet downtime, low visibility, or other incidents.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| ThousandEyes | 2.1% |
| Microsoft System Center | 0.7% |
| Other | 97.2% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 7 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 10 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 6 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
ThousandEyes is a Network Intelligence platform that delivers visibility into every network an organization relies on, whether public or private. ThousandEyes enables users to optimize application delivery, end-user experience and ongoing infrastructure investments.
With cloud, enterprises can innovate much faster, but the growing number of cloud and SaaS applications means that more apps are being delivered over the Internet. This increases dependence on the Internet, a public “best effort” network, and other third-party infrastructures, substantially reducing the ability of IT teams to predict, visualize and control operational behavior. This results in a chaotic and unmanageable IT environment, making issue resolution a time-consuming ordeal, potentially impacting reputation and revenue. ThousandEyes has innovated an approach based on an unmatched distribution of smart agents across the Internet and enterprise, providing visibility all the way to the end user. ThousandEyes gathers and analyzes massive volumes of Network Intelligence data from all of these vantage points, enabling organizations to solve even their most obscure performance problems in minutes. By using ThousandEyes in the planning and testing phases of cloud adoption, customers can also strategically identify and fix underlying problems before production deployment of business-critical applications.
The ThousandEyes solution is ubiquitous across industry sectors, and since launching in mid-2013, customers have come from a diverse set of industry sectors, which include Silicon Valley technology companies, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, retail, manufacturing and education.
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