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ThousandEyes on the FW

⚠ WIP

Placeholder chapter with outline only. Content to be written as the lab is built. Feedback and PRs welcome.

Prerequisites: Chapter 6: FDM baseline; FTD 7.6+ for native integration path.

Add Cisco ThousandEyes for end-to-end path visibility from the FW outward. Cisco tenant access via employee credentials.

Licensing note

ThousandEyes on Nexus/FTD requires a ThousandEyes tenant + endpoint agent. See Chapter 14: Licensing.

ThousandEyes tenant

  • Access via thousandeyes.com with Cisco credentials
  • Existing Cisco tenant already has 200+ cloud agents worldwide
  • Add a local agent for home-lab-side visibility

Local agent — deploy on a Pi

The most common home-lab pattern:

  • Raspberry Pi 4 (or spare Pi 3B+)
  • ThousandEyes Endpoint Agent for Linux
  • Runs on the inside network — sees the path from home to any test target

Fill in: exact Pi setup steps, agent install, test config.

FTD as a target

  • Add a test in the ThousandEyes dashboard: Network → HTTP Server → target the FTD's outside IP or a hosted URL on the FW-served demo
  • Schedule: every 5 minutes
  • Add path visualization

Native FTD integration (post-onboarding)

FTD 7.6+ has native ThousandEyes integration — the FTD itself can act as a test target. Configure via FDM:

Fill in: FDM's ThousandEyes integration steps, endpoint agent registration.

Verify

  • ThousandEyes dashboard → Test → see path from Pi to FTD to internet
  • Path visualization shows FTD as a hop
  • Latency + loss stats populated within 5-10 min

Use case

The main demo value: when a customer says "the firewall is slow", point at the ThousandEyes test showing the actual latency spike is upstream. Firewall vendors get blamed for problems they don't own — this proves the fault location in one screen.

Next

Head to Licensing — eval to production for how to graduate from 90-day eval to real smart licensing.