Welcome to ThousandEyes!

This article gives a quick overview of how to use the ThousandEyes platform and directs you to locations where you can find more information. If you think you've got what it takes, then just skip forward to adding tests and agents, and come back here to understand everything later.

Check out this helpful video on getting started with the ThousandEyes platform.

Getting help

Before anything, understand where you can find information:

• The Page Guide, available on any ThousandEyes page, is an overlay that shows where specific elements are on each page and provides short descriptions of each.
• Customer Success Center, available at https://support.thousandeyes.com, provides access to Knowledge Base articles, Community forums, and Tickets submitted through our support system.
• Contact our Customer Success team, using any of the following means:
  • Email: send us an email at support@thousandeyes.com, and we'll be sure to engage promptly.
  • Live chat: Join us by chat by selecting the "?" icon, in the upper right side of the platform view and selecting the "Chat with Support" Link. Begin your chats in the pop-up window that comes up at the lower right of the ThousandEyes interface. This allows you to chat in real time with members of our Customer Success Team.
  • Call us, at +1 (415) 237-EYES

Platform Layouts

Next, start to understand the layouts used by the platform. There are two standard layouts, used by various views within the ThousandEyes platform. Once you understand how the layouts are structured, you can navigate the various views with ease:

• Menus and navigation are standard across the platform. For information on menus and navigation, consult the "Navigation Bar and Menu" section of the layouts article here. 
• Standard layout: this layout is used by most views within the platform. Read further on the standard layout here for details on how the standard layout works.
• DNS+ layout: this layout is used on all DNS+ tests.  DNS+ is an optional module, and not available to all ThousandEyes account subscriptions. For more information on the DNS+ layout, review the document here.

Test types

You're on your way! Next, start working to understand each test by type, and the metrics returned by each type of test.

Test types are documented in the adding tests article, but if you want a quick sneak peek, have a look at test information here.

At a high level, the metrics returned by the platform are captured in the "ThousandMetrics" Knowledge Base article.  See here for more details.

Adding Enterprise Agents

To deploy tests which take measurements from inside your own infrastructure, or to test assets that are not exposed to the internet, you need to deploy one or more Enterprise Agents. Documentation on deploying Enterprise Agents can be found here. 

Adding tests

Now you're ready to grab the bull by the horns and start testing. Great! Adding tests is really simple, and fully explained in this article.

Adding users and managing your account

Account management is built into the account settings tab of the product and allows Organization Admins to manage all settings for their account. It's quite simple and easy to use. Two articles will help in understanding account management:

1. Understanding roles and permissions - this document outlines the permissions for each of the three user roles, and in determining which user role to assign to each of your users.  
2. Account settings - this document how to interact with the account settings page of the product: 

Managing alerts

Great, now you've got a test or two configured, and want to customize your Alert Rules. Simply put, alerting is configured out of the box to alert you when you need information about tests which are failing. If you need to get more granular, or change some of the notification rules, check out this article for information on fine-tuning and managing alerts. 

Creating reports

Reporting is really simple: you can generate a report, view existing reports, or run instant tests, the choice is yours. Check out these helpful articles on the topics below:

• Generating reports: generate your own report, either on demand or on a scheduled basis.
• Viewing existing reports: working with reports that have been run in the past.

Sweet! You're now a superhero with network x-ray vision. If you feel up to it, check out our API integration, which is an advanced topic, found below.

API Integration

So now you're a ThousandEyes expert, you rockstar you. There's a whole category for API articles, found by following this link.