We all know the drill: A full network outage grinds business to a halt, triggering an all-hands-on-deck response. But what happens when the network isn’t down, just slow? Unlike a complete outage, subtle drops in performance can creep into daily workflows, eroding productivity and impacting the bottom line without setting off major alarms.
Today, experience is the new uptime, and degradation is the new downtime. Users expect instant access and seamless experiences, so “slow” can be just as detrimental as “down,” leading to frustration, lost revenue, and missed opportunities.
Think about your sales team unable to access critical customer data during a key pitch, or remote employees facing frozen screens at the worst possible moment. These seemingly minor slowdowns can quietly undermine productivity and have a measurable impact on overall business performance.
The challenge for NetOps teams is pinpointing the root cause of these intermittent performance issues, especially in today’s complex, distributed campus and branch environments. Emerging technologies like AI agents only make this harder, introducing new demands for resilience and robust assurance.
And with 64% of companies expecting a skills shortage by 2026, the pressure to do more with less is only growing. Meeting this challenge demands tools that are intelligent, proactive, and built for scale. That’s where AI-powered proactive assurance comes in—helping NetOps teams stay ahead of issues, streamline operations, and deliver consistent performance across complex environments.
The hidden cost of network complexity
Modern campus and branch networks are the backbone of today’s businesses, supporting an increasingly diverse range of critical interactions. But managing them is far from simple. Several key factors are rapidly escalating network complexity—creating both operational headaches and strategic challenges for IT leaders:
- Distributed resources: The shift to cloud and SaaS puts critical services outside your direct control—meaning the digital experience now depends on networks and applications you don’t own.
- Remote and hybrid work: Supporting a hybrid distributed workforce means dealing with unpredictable home networks, ISPs, and VPNs—environments where IT has little to no visibility and control.
- BYOD and IoT: The surge in personal and IoT devices has created a sprawling, diverse landscape of endpoints to manage and secure—adding significantly more complexity for IT teams.
- Security: Modern security architectures, while critical, can obscure traffic paths, making it inherently difficult to trace and troubleshoot issues impacting users’ digital experience.
This growing complexity creates visibility gaps that make it hard to pinpoint the root cause of performance issues. Is it the SaaS application? An ISP outage? A VPN problem? Or something on the user’s device? Intermittent issues like these can turn troubleshooting into a significant drain on IT resources.
Modern WAN complexity requires end-to-end visibility
From firefighting to forward-thinking IT
Even if users don’t report every minor issue, the cumulative effect of suboptimal network performance can still affect productivity and business outcomes—from reduced customer satisfaction and reputational damage to lost revenue. According to ITIC, network downtime can cost companies more than $300,000 per hour, and in some cases, exceed $5 million.
To mitigate these risks, NetOps teams must proactively identify and resolve even minor and intermittent issues before they impact users. However, many organizations still rely on legacy monitoring tools that are simply not equipped to handle the demands of today’s complex networks. These tools often operate in silos, lack end-to-end correlation, and are poorly suited to meet the scale and speed demands of AI-driven infrastructure.
An AI-powered, automated, and proactive approach is essential to overcome these challenges and deliver consistent, high-performance network operations.
The strategic role of assurance
That’s where modern assurance becomes essential. Managing complexity, supporting AI-driven operations, and bridging skills gaps demands more than traditional monitoring tools.
Cisco ThousandEyes delivers this modern approach. It’s a shift from passive monitoring to proactive, intelligent assurance that puts user experience at the center. Instead of simply collecting data, ThousandEyes continuously analyzes telemetry across the entire digital delivery chain—spanning both owned and unowned environments, across every network and cloud, to every device. From the corporate network to public clouds to endpoints everywhere—from routers and switches to applications and end-user devices—it delivers true end-to-end visibility and actionable insights into network performance.
And it’s all powered by AI. ThousandEyes applies advanced algorithms to detect anomalies, anticipate disruptions, and recommend actions—often before users are even aware there’s an issue. With its natural language interface, the Cisco AI Assistant allows teams to interact with data, troubleshoot issues, and take informed actions faster—no deep technical expertise required.
Cisco ThousandEyes powers modern assurance across three critical dimensions:
- End-to-end visibility: ThousandEyes provides visibility from any user to any application, over any network—public or private. This experience-first approach eliminates blind spots by spanning both owned and unowned environments, helping teams quickly pinpoint where performance is breaking down, whether it’s the ISP, SaaS provider, or internal infrastructure.
- AI-driven intelligence: By combining deep network telemetry with advanced AI, ThousandEyes enables intelligent detection of anomalies, predictive insights into where performance may degrade, and contextual understanding of impact. This is not just about alerts—it’s about seeing how issues unfold across layers and domains, so teams can act before users are affected.
- Closed-loop operations: ThousandEyes turns insight into action. Through integrations with Cisco Networking, share links to collaborate across teams and third parties, and Cisco AI Assistant to drive automation, organizations can simplify workflows and accelerate resolution. ThousandEyes is integrated into the Meraki dashboard, Catalyst Center, Splunk ITSI, and beyond—empowering IT teams to respond faster, reduce manual effort, and maintain consistently high performance across environments.
Leading organizations, such as Insight Global, rely on Cisco ThousandEyes to proactively optimize SD-WAN policies, prioritize critical applications, and improve the user experience. By using WAN Insights and application-aware routing, the team is able to track every hop, understand their traffic routes, and identify every service provider involved from end to end.
As a result, the team has seen improved collaboration application performance and streamlined IT operations—significantly improving end-user experiences in the office. Plus, with a decline in service desk tickets related to collaboration tools, the team could focus on monitoring and improving other heavily used applications within the organization.
Learn more about their use case in this customer story.
Delivering exceptional digital experiences
Meeting the experience expectations of today’s users demands a new level of cross-domain assurance—integrating capabilities like networking (LAN/WAN, Wi-Fi), observability, and AI-powered operations.
Cisco ThousandEyes is deeply integrated across the Cisco technology portfolio, providing a powerful solution to assure reliable, resilient digital experiences across your networking, security, collaboration, and observability investments. Cisco ThousandEyes delivers unmatched visibility, measuring performance from everywhere that truly matters—from the user’s devices at home or on mobile, across the internet and SaaS, into the branch, data center, and even industrial networks.
And it’s not just breadth; it’s the depth of insight that counts. Cisco ThousandEyes uses advanced techniques like real-time BGP anomaly correlation, internet-scale root cause localization, and cross-layer correlation to give you a complete picture and pinpoint exactly where issues originate.
By proactively identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks, Cisco ThousandEyes helps organizations deliver exceptional user experiences across today’s complex, cross-domain networks—making sure “slow” never becomes the new “down.”
See how Cisco ThousandEyes can help you optimize performance, elevate user experience, and drive measurable business impact.
Learn more about Cisco ThousandEyes
