Network Intelligence Eliminates Blind Spots Across 280 Retail Stores
A 280-store, employee-owned grocery chain — and a network that nobody could see into.
The customer is a 280+ store employee-owned supermarket chain operating across the Midwestern and Southern United States. Employee-owned means every operational failure — every checkout that goes slow, every voice call that drops, every third-party integration that misbehaves — is a direct cost to the people who own the business.
At that scale, the network isn't a back-office function. It's the operational spine of a business serving communities across two regions. When the network struggles, stores struggle. And when you can't see into your own network, you can't fix what's broken before it becomes something your customers notice.
A vast network. Critical blind spots. And problems that appeared faster than they could be diagnosed.
Operating 280+ store locations across two US regions means running a network of considerable complexity — point-of-sale systems, voice communications, third-party services, and real-time applications all running simultaneously, all interdependent, and all expected to be available when someone needs them.
The customer grappled with four critical challenges that were compounding on each other:
Visibility Gaps Across the Network
No unified view of what was happening across 280+ locations. Problems were invisible until they surfaced as incidents — by which point the damage was already done.
Performance Black Holes
Traffic was disappearing into unmapped paths. The team could see that performance was degrading — but not where, not why, and not which layer of the stack was responsible.
Unreliable Voice Communication
Voice call quality across the store network was inconsistent. Calls were dropping, degrading, or performing differently across locations — with no structured way to diagnose the root cause.
Third-Party Service Dependency Issues
When something failed, the team couldn't distinguish between an internal network problem and a third-party service issue. Every incident became a lengthy elimination exercise.
The real problem: this wasn't a technology gap. It was an operating model problem. The team was managing a 280-store network without the visibility infrastructure to operate it proactively. Every issue was reactive — and by the time they knew something was wrong, it had already affected store operations.
One platform. Complete visibility. Built for how this network actually operates.
To achieve end-to-end visibility and proactive issue identification, OnStak recommended and deployed Cisco ThousandEyes — consolidating the customer's entire network monitoring onto a single platform. This wasn't a tool drop. It was a comprehensive monitoring initiative, built and tuned specifically for the customer's environment.
The engagement covered everything: architecture, agent placement, test configuration, alert logic, dashboard design, and integration with existing systems. The output was a network operations function that could finally see what was happening — and act on it before stores felt the impact.
Boosting Network Visibility — Architecture & Agent Placement
Optimised the ThousandEyes architecture and agent placement across the network to ensure complete coverage. Every path, every dependency, every third-party connection — mapped and monitored. No more black holes.
Mapping Key Dependencies & Configuring Tests
Identified and mapped the customer's critical network dependencies. Deployed custom ThousandEyes tests to monitor specific network paths, applications, and services — designed around how the supermarket chain actually operates, not a generic template.
Bi-Directional Voice Test Optimisation
Utilised ThousandEyes' Voice Tracer to analyse and optimise voice call quality across the network. Bi-directional testing revealed where voice degradation was occurring and why — giving the team the data to fix it, not just observe it.
Alert Rule Set-Up — Threshold-Based, Trigger-Conditioned
Configured custom alert rules based on predefined performance thresholds and trigger conditions. The team now receives actionable alerts when something matters — not a noise flood of system events that take longer to interpret than to ignore.
Label Configuration for Agents and Tests
Implemented a structured labelling system for agents and tests across the network. When an incident fires, the team can immediately identify what it affects, where it is, and what to look at first — turning root cause analysis from hours into minutes.
Dashboard Configuration & Optimisation
Collaboratively designed interactive dashboards for real-time performance visualisation and actionable insights. Tailored to the customer's KPI requirements — not a default view that requires interpretation, but a purpose-built operational command surface.
Webhook Integration for Real-Time Communication
Integrated ThousandEyes with the customer's existing alerting systems via webhook — so critical network issues surface immediately in the tools the team already uses, without requiring anyone to check a separate dashboard.
Snapshot & Widget Utilisation for Trend Analysis
Leveraged ThousandEyes' Snapshots and customisable widgets for deeper data analysis and trend identification. The team can now share a complete network state snapshot with any stakeholder — internal or external — with a single click.
Every user. Every path. Every dependency — mapped and monitored.
ThousandEyes gives the team a live view of every network path from every agent location — showing exactly where traffic travels, where it degrades, and which hop is responsible. For a 280-store network, this changes everything about how incidents are diagnosed and resolved.
"You can't fix what you can't see. For a 280-store network, visibility isn't a nice-to-have — it's the operating model. ThousandEyes gave this team the ability to know exactly what's happening across every path, every dependency, and every third-party service — before their stores feel the impact."
OnStak Assurance & Operations Practice — Engagement LeadFrom reactive to proactive. From blind spots to full visibility.
As a result of the ThousandEyes deployment and OnStak's configuration work, the customer achieved the following outcomes — each one a direct consequence of having the right visibility infrastructure in place:
One platform. Configured to match how 280 stores actually operate.
ThousandEyes was selected because it was the right answer for the customer's environment — not because it was the most familiar option. The value wasn't in the tool. It was in how it was configured, tuned, and integrated into the customer's existing operations.
The credentials behind the delivery.
Every ThousandEyes engagement is delivered by certified practitioners. The depth of expertise on this project spanned network engineering, cloud architecture, and Cisco's application experience programme.