# Quick Start Guide

## The 3-Minute Workflow

Provider Intelligence is designed to deliver actionable insights quickly. Follow the steps below to evaluate service providers.

## Prerequisites

Before you begin:

* You must have an active Internet Insights subscription.
* Use a modern web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari).

No additional configuration, agent deployment, or test setup is required.

### Finding Provider Intelligence

* Once logged in to ThousandEyes, navigate to **Internet Insights > Provider Intelligence**.
  * You will arrive on the Provider Intelligence console where you can build your first provider comparison in the **Query Builder**.

## Step 1: Define Your Query

![Query builder with time frame, locations, destinations, and metric priorities](/files/LQIuuBRs4e8zLjSeewzu)

Use the **Query Builder** to specify:

* **Time Frame**: Select 1, 3, or 6 months of historical data, rolling from today.
* **User Locations**: Select one or more cities where you need provider evaluation.
* **Destinations** (optional): Choose specific applications (for example, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce) or cloud regions (for example, AWS US-East-1) that you know your users regularly access to optimize results specific to your use case.
* **Results Calculation**: Choose whether to calculate overall scores on **Performance** only (best average metrics compared to peers over the period) or on **Performance & Stability** (best relative metric performance *and* most consistent metrics over time compared to provider’s own median performance).
* **Prioritize Metrics**: Drag and drop metrics (latency, loss, jitter, Time to First Byte (only available when applications are selected)) to weight the analysis toward your performance priorities.

When you’re ready, click **Explore Providers** to view your results.

See [Build A Query](https://docs.thousandeyes.com/product-documentation/internet-insights/provider-intelligence/build-a-query) for details about each query parameter.

## Step 2: Analyze the Results

![Results page with provider tables, scores, and destination view options](/files/7ZCYixl90FzBZMOsMFBq)

Once you submit your query, Provider Intelligence displays:

* **A summary of your query parameters:** Change any parameter at any time to generate fresh results.
* **All providers per location**: Shown in descending order by overall score: a separate results table is displayed for each location.
  * Note: Providers in multiple locations might not appear in the same relative order across locations because performance scores are relative to other providers in each location.
* **Performance and Stability scores**: Every metric displays a performance score and a stability score. These feed into the overall score depending on which results calculation you choose.
* **Destination Views**: View normalized scores in the **Summary View**, or raw metrics in a single-destination view (filter by any single destination you originally queried on).
  * If you didn’t choose any destinations, you’ll see results displayed in the **Universal Application Summary** view, which displays provider performance across *all application* destinations available in our dataset with test coverage from your selected locations. This provides broad provider performance data for all the locations you’re interested in.

See [View Results](https://docs.thousandeyes.com/product-documentation/internet-insights/provider-intelligence/view-results) for additional results comparison guidance.

## Step 3: (Optional) Generate a Saveable Report

In the **Summary View**, select up to 5 providers across each location and click **Generate Report** to create:

* A summary document with query parameters, metric details, overall scores and “Recommended” tags for the provider(s) you prefer for each location and destinations.
* A saved "time capsule" of the analysis available on the Provider Intelligence console for future reference.

See [Generate Reports](https://docs.thousandeyes.com/product-documentation/internet-insights/provider-intelligence/generate-reports) for report creation guidance.

## Advanced Options

* Get granular, hourly details for each metric on each provider via the [Time Series](https://docs.thousandeyes.com/product-documentation/internet-insights/provider-intelligence/analyze-time-series) tool.
* Change the [summary statistic](https://docs.thousandeyes.com/product-documentation/internet-insights/provider-intelligence/view-results/summary-statistics) to understand how providers perform under different conditions, from best-case to typical to worst-case.

## Related Articles

* [Build A Query](https://docs.thousandeyes.com/product-documentation/internet-insights/provider-intelligence/build-a-query): Learn how to customize your analysis.
* [Scoring Methodologies](https://docs.thousandeyes.com/product-documentation/internet-insights/provider-intelligence/scoring-methodologies): Understand how scoring works.
* [Glossary of Terms](https://docs.thousandeyes.com/product-documentation/internet-insights/provider-intelligence/glossary-of-terms): Familiarize yourself with key concepts.


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