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Case study

Cisco ThousandEyes Automates Promotions for 2,500 Applications with Akuity Kargo

Standardized promotion pipelines eliminate manual release coordination and simplify multi-environment deployments.

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Industry

Enterprise Software

Company size:

Enterprise

Location:

California

2,500+ Applications

Standardized promotion pipelines across thousands of services

Merge Once, Promote Automatically

Automated pipelines replace environment-by-environment pull request

Company Overview

Cisco ThousandEyes helps organizations monitor and troubleshoot digital experiences across networks, applications, and cloud services. Its platform enables IT teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues that affect end-user performance.

ThousandEyes is integrated across Cisco’s technology portfolio and supports deployments across networking, security, collaboration, and observability environments.

Cisco ThousandEyes Standardizes Software Delivery with Akuity Kargo

Cisco ThousandEyes uses Kargo Enterprise from Akuity to automate application promotions across 25 environments while continuing to run self-hosted Argo CD. By introducing structured promotion pipelines with Kargo, the ThousandEyes platform team replaced manual environment-by-environment releases with a consistent automated workflow. Developers can now merge a change once and rely on the pipeline to promote it safely through environments.

Challenge

Managing application promotions across multiple environment

Cisco ThousandEyes adopted Kubernetes early and built a GitOps workflow around Argo CD to manage application deployments. As the platform expanded to more clusters, regions, and services, coordinating releases across environments became increasingly complex.

Over time, the platform grew to support 2,500+ applications deployed across multiple clusters and AWS regions. Argo CD handled application deployments effectively, but promoting releases across environments still required manual steps, including opening multiple pull requests and coordinating updates across clusters.

“We had a build pipeline, but when it came time to deploy, there wasn’t really a proper promotion workflow,” said Nikolay Denev, Technical Lead on the Engineering Effectiveness team at Cisco ThousandEyes.

Releases often had to be promoted one environment at a time, with developers manually ensuring changes moved through staging and production in the correct order. As the platform grew, this approach created operational friction and limited visibility into what versions of services were running across environments.

“When you’re operating many clusters, it’s not easy to know what version is running where,” Nikolay Denev said.

The team needed a way to standardize promotions, enforce release ordering, and provide a clear view of deployment progress.

Solution

Introducing automated promotion pipelines for consistent releases

Cisco ThousandEyes introduced Kargo Enterprise from Akuity to manage application promotions across environments while continuing to use their existing Argo CD GitOps workflows.

Kargo allowed the platform team to define structured promotion pipelines that control how releases move through environments, including automated verification checks between stages.

Because Kargo integrates directly with Argo CD, developers did not need to change their existing workflows or tooling.

“What stood out about Kargo was how well it integrates with Argo CD,” said Nikolay Denev, Technical Lead on the Engineering Effectiveness team at Cisco ThousandEyes. “It filled a gap in our deployment process without forcing developers to adopt something completely different.”

To simplify adoption and ensure consistency across teams, the platform team built internal automation around Kargo that automatically generates pipeline configuration for new services.

Using a Backstage template and GitHub automation, new services are onboarded to Kargo by default and the required promotion stages are created automatically.

This allows teams to adopt standardized promotion pipelines without manually configuring deployment workflows.

“All new services are onboarded to Kargo by default,” Denev said.

Results

Replacing manual release coordination with automated promotions

With Kargo in place, Cisco ThousandEyes replaced manual environment-by-environment promotions with automated pipelines.

Developers can now rely on structured promotion workflows instead of manually coordinating releases across clusters.

“In many cases now, developers can just open a pull request, run the checks, merge it, and the system takes care of the rest,” said Nikolay Denev, Technical Lead on the Engineering Effectiveness team at Cisco ThousandEyes.

Previously, rolling out a change across environments required opening and managing multiple pull requests.

“Before, rolling out a change across all environments could mean opening dozens of pull requests and managing them manually,” Denev said. “Now we merge the change and simply watch the pipeline progress.”

Kargo also provides a single view of deployment progress across environments, making it easier to understand what versions are running across clusters during releases and incidents.

“For us, the single view of what’s happening across environments is extremely valuable.”

The team also uses Kargo’s verification capabilities to run automated checks between stages, helping detect issues earlier in the rollout process and preventing problematic releases from progressing through environments.

Developer Experience

Enabling “merge and forget” deployments

One of the most significant improvements has been the simplicity of the developer workflow.

Instead of manually coordinating promotions, developers can now rely on automated pipelines that handle the rollout across environments.

Enabling “merge and forget” deployments

One of the most significant improvements has been the simplicity of the developer workflow.

Instead of manually coordinating promotions, developers can now rely on automated pipelines that handle the rollout across environments.

“I might have a service that deploys to more than 25 environments,” said Nikolay Denev, Technical Lead on the Engineering Effectiveness team at Cisco ThousandEyes. “Before, I had to manage pull requests for each environment. Now I merge the changes and the pipeline handles the rollout.”

“With Kargo, we can really “merge and forget.”

Simplifying Application Promotions Across the Platform

With Akuity Kargo, Cisco ThousandEyes standardized how application releases move through environments, replacing manual promotion steps with automated pipelines and giving developers a consistent path to production.