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

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 for details about each query parameter.

Step 2: Analyze the Results

Results page with provider tables, scores, and destination view options

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 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 for report creation guidance.

Advanced Options

  • Get granular, hourly details for each metric on each provider via the Time Series tool.

  • Change the summary statistic to understand how providers perform under different conditions, from best-case to typical to worst-case.

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