In today’s highly connected world, ensuring optimal network performance is more important than ever. It can prove to be a major driver within the retail, hospitality, and QSR (quick service restaurant) industries where customer experience can be a key differentiator. With businesses increasingly relying on cloud applications, SaaS services, and distributed teams, maintaining visibility into how networks perform—both within and beyond the organization’s walls—has become a critical challenge.
Retail, Hospitality, and QSR Industries Require Network Visibility
For retail, hospitality, and QSR industries, every second of downtime or degraded performance can result in lost revenue, frustrated customers, and a damaged reputation. From inventory management to assuring point-of-sale (POS) systems to handling online transactions, the stakes are high when it comes to ensuring that network infrastructure operates with minimum interruptions.
Additionally, many retail businesses are managing networks that span multiple locations with an increasing reliance on cloud-based services and SaaS applications to support business-critical operations like inventory tracking and payment processing. This distributed environment makes it even more challenging to monitor performance and troubleshoot network issues effectively.
Traditional monitoring tools often fall short when it comes to understanding the broader Internet and cloud-based environments. That’s where Cisco ThousandEyes comes in. As the industry leader in providing Assurance, today we are announcing the availability of ThousandEyes on Cisco’s ISR 1000 Series routers. This integration empowers IT and network teams with real-time visibility, proactive monitoring, and robust troubleshooting capabilities, helping to maintain the overall performance of their networks and applications.
Cisco ISR 1000 Series: The Backbone of Small and Medium Enterprise Networks
Cisco’s ISR 1000 Series routers have become a trusted choice for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), branch offices, and remote sites. These devices deliver secure, reliable, and scalable networking, with a strong focus on performance and ease of management. They come equipped with essential features such as integrated security, SD-WAN capabilities (along with Cisco SD-WAN Manager, a powerful set of graphical dashboards, for easy onboarding), VPN support, and application-aware routing.
However, while the ISR 1000 Series is designed to provide secure, high-performance networking within the enterprise, visibility into the performance of networks outside the corporate perimeter, such as the public Internet, cloud environments, and third-party services, has traditionally been limited. ThousandEyes enhances the routers’ enterprise monitoring capabilities with end-to-end visibility, cloud, and SaaS performance monitoring, leading to a better omnichannel customer experience.
ThousandEyes' Integration With Cisco ISR 1000 Provides Deeper Visibility
By integrating ThousandEyes with Cisco ISR 1000 Series routers, organizations gain deeper visibility into their entire network infrastructure. This integration brings together Cisco’s robust routing and security features with ThousandEyes’ industry-leading network intelligence platform, offering the following benefits:
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End-to-end Visibility: Organizations need full visibility into the health and performance of both their local networks and the cloud-based services their teams rely on. ThousandEyes provides visibility into performance metrics from the branch to the cloud, allowing administrators to diagnose network problems quickly and comprehensively.
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Cloud and SaaS Performance Monitoring: Many businesses, including those in retail, rely on cloud-based applications like inventory management, payment processing gateways, and POS systems. Monitoring the performance of these services is crucial to avoid disruptions in business-critical operations.
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Improved Omnichannel Customer Experience: Customers accessing retail services (e.g., POS, payment gateways) in physical locations need fast and reliable experiences, particularly during peak traffic times. Delays or downtime can result in checkout abandonment or poor customer satisfaction.
Integration Is Tailored for Diverse Customer Profiles
This integration is designed with a wide range of customers in mind, particularly those who need scalable solutions for managing complex network environments. Here are some of the key customers profiles who will benefit the most:
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Small to Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs): Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) often face the challenge of managing network performance with limited IT resources. The integration of ThousandEyes on Cisco ISR 1000 Series routers provides these organizations with enterprise-grade monitoring tools without the complexity and high cost typically associated with large-scale network management solutions. It enables SMBs to proactively monitor network health and troubleshoot issues—all from a centralized platform.
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Distributed Teams and Remote Offices: For organizations with multiple remote offices, branch locations, or a hybrid workforce, maintaining network performance and availability is critical. The ThousandEyes integration helps make sure that distributed teams have the visibility they need to identify and address performance bottlenecks, whether the issue is on the local network, between branch locations, or in the public Internet.
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Cloud-first and Hybrid Cloud Enterprises: Organizations that have adopted cloud-first strategies or operate in hybrid cloud environments can also find much value from the ThousandEyes integration. This solution helps them ensure that cloud applications are performing as expected and that their SD-WAN solution is optimally routing traffic, with fewer latency or reliability issues.
Empower Your Network With ThousandEyes and Cisco ISR 1000 Series
The integration of ThousandEyes with Cisco ISR 1000 Series routers enables IT and network teams to monitor and troubleshoot network performance. By combining Cisco’s powerful hardware with ThousandEyes’ Assurance capabilities, organizations can gain comprehensive visibility across their entire infrastructure, enabling them to deliver superior user experiences and maintain a resilient network.
Whether an SMB, a distributed organization, or a cloud-first enterprise, ThousandEyes can help you manage your network more effectively, reduce downtime, and maintain performance, all while streamlining operations.
Ready to enhance your network intelligence? Contact your Cisco representative today to learn more about how ThousandEyes on Cisco ISR 1000 Series can help your organization thrive in the digital age.
Check out the links below for additional information about the integration:
- Release Notes: Cisco ISR 1000 Series
- Release Notes: Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Control Components Release 20.16.x
- ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents