Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

reviewer1371603

Manager IT Production Service at a maritime company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 12, 2020

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Reduced our migration time and downtime

Pros and Cons

"The solution’s UI and single pane of glass is good. The new dashboard is modern with its new design. The look of it is not pretty, but it is efficient, which is good. It is user-friendly; you can find what you need on the interface quickly."

"It needs the possibility to export data because it is not easy to see larger data sets, e.g., for one month. It would be interesting to export data into a PDF or dashboard to keep a history of the situation."

What is our primary use case?

We use Skylight to monitor the performance of our network on different sites. We also use it to troubleshoot if there is an issue on the network/standard and the end user experience is good.

Recently, we used Skylight to monitor the amount of external user VPNs. With COVID-19, we have many people who work at home. We used Skylight to count the number of users and monitor the Internet line to see if there was a point of saturation.

It is mostly deployed on-premise with some services in the cloud.

How has it helped my organization?

It has sort of improved capacity planning by helping to size the network bandwidth or performance for the infrastructure.

Skylight is on our data center. Only our network teams have access to it. However, the network team does speak about the diagram of the dashboard to the application team, who doesn't have access to Skylight. Thus, the solution has helped to improve the interaction between our network and application teams as we work together.

What is most valuable?

We use it for troubleshooting, e.g., when we are currently in an IT territory migration, we can check if there is a computer or server using the old domain controller to analyze the network traffic. We can find it faster than the computer using the old domain group. It's more efficient to change it for the network migration this way, and Skylight accelerates this.

The solution’s UI and single pane of glass is good. The new dashboard is modern with its new design. The look of it is not pretty, but it is efficient, which is good. It is user-friendly; you can find what you need on the interface quickly.

What needs improvement?

It needs the possibility to export data because it is not easy to see larger data sets, e.g., for one month. It would be interesting to export data into a PDF or dashboard to keep a history of the situation.

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For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using the solution since September last year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is very stable. We have had no issues when it comes to downtime. It has reduced downtime because we have no solution for migrating the DNS. With Skylight, we never forget anything. It has also reduced our migration time.

We have two people who do maintenance: a network manager and a network administrator.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good. With this license, we can deploy 25 probes. Therefore, it is possible to add new probes for scalability.

We don't have a big team. Less than 10 people in the networking team use the solution. Many people can see the data, but less than 10 can use it.

We collect the data for only 10 sites. In the future (maybe next year), we can deploy Skylight onto other sites.

How are customer service and support?

I don't use the technical support.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We were not using anything before this solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was easy and simple. It took three hours to deploy with the network configuration because it is important to configure the network to collect data for the probe.

What about the implementation team?

One person did the setup.

What was our ROI?

The solution is for quality, not to reduce money.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We tried out Dynatrace and Riverbed. It is simpler to deploy Skylight. There is no need for an agent on the server or network to collect data. Also, Skylight had the cheaper price.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10). If they add exporting data to PDF, I could made the rating a 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

Joel Baczynski

Network Administrator at CHR Citadelle de Liège

Mar 17, 2019

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Makes it easier to troubleshoot, to get a view of my network's health

Pros and Cons

"I always have the Skylight dashboard on one of my screens... Now you can create your own dashboard, specific to an application, specific to a server, or to something else."

What is our primary use case?

We are a hospital and we have a lot of external consultants and a lot of external programs. When we have a performance problem with a program, generally the response of the consultant is, "Oh, it's your network, your infrastructure, your server." With Skylight it's easy to prove that the problem is not our infrastructure and, in most cases, the problem is the application.

We use it to improve the performance of the database tables as well as for our Citrix solution.

How has it helped my organization?

I do a lot of troubleshooting with Skylight, troubleshooting network speed and application performance. It's really good because we have all the metrics, and it's very easy to find a direct route to the problem.

For example, one month ago we had to change a lot of servers in a laboratory. Before the change of the infrastructure, we took a snapshot of the network infrastructure and the performance. After the replacement of the servers, we took the same snapshot, the same picture of the network and the performance. We could see if the network was better and if the server performance was better than the old server. It was easy for us to see if the replacement of the hardware was good or not; or, after the virtualization of a server, if the performance is better or not. Without Skylight it would be difficult to compare because we would not have any measurements.

My work is easier with Skylight. It's easier to troubleshoot. It's easier to get a view of my network's health.

It has also helped to improve the interaction between our network, data center, and application teams. I can generate a report, for example, of database status or health. It makes it easier to discuss with the database administrators, to explain where a problem is. It's much easier to explain issues and to discuss them with the correct guy.

It's very important for us to have it. We save a lot of time when we have a problem. It's very easy to point to the problem and to get to the solution, whether it's a network problem, an application problem, or a server problem. It's very easy with Skylight.

In addition, it has improved productivity for sure. Regarding improvements in downtime, it's difficult to evaluate because we had a lot of other sensors to help us know if a server had a problem or if there was a database problem. If it was a big crash, for example, we had that information before we started using Skylight. If the issue is a degradation of an application or a service, Skylight is very useful because we see it on the main dashboard. We see all the applications. It's a critical application. If we have a green, and after that it's orange and then red, we know we have a problem. It's easy.

What is most valuable?

All the features are valuable. I am a network engineer, so I principally use the network sensor.

I always have the Skylight dashboard on one of my screens. The dashboard used to be very simple, a fixed dashboard, you couldn't change anything on it. But there has been a lot of improvement in the new version. Now you can create your own dashboard, specific to an application, specific to a server, or to something else.

The UI is very comfortable, it's very useful. It's very simple to use. It's very simple to explain to someone who doesn't know what a network is.

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's a very stable application. I have never had to reboot the server, other than after an upgrade. And to upgrade it takes about ten minutes.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The product is very scalable.

We have two internal data centers and two external data centers; one for production and one for the development. We have about 200 access switches. We have Citrix farms and about 200 servers with Windows and Linux. We have a mainframe. It's a large environment.

We have had no issues with scaling.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support from the Skylight is very good. When we have a problem with deploying or configuring something, it's very easy to contact technical support and they are very good. In general, within one hour, we have the response to our problem. It's the quickest support I see, and I use technical support from Cisco, from Palo Alto. Skylight support is very fast.

We had to escalate an issue one time. They redirected me to R&D and I had a response in one or two hours, with the correction I needed.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We didn't use anything before Skylight.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Skylight is very easy. It takes about ten minutes. In ten minutes the server is running and it's collecting information. That ten minutes is when you have a physical version. For a VMware version it takes about one hour to deploy it, but it's very easy.

The initial deployment is easy, but for the rest, day-to-day, there is work: To configure the zones, the critical networks, critical applications, it's day-to-day. The initial setup is easy, but afterward, I worked on it for about an hour every day. The configuration is ongoing.

What about the implementation team?

I deployed it directly.

What was our ROI?

It has clearly saved us money. For example, when we have a problem with an external application and we meet with the distributor of the application, they will say, "Okay, the problem is the performance of the server." The distributor will suggest we get a new server with more capacity, more disk, more memory, more everything. We can prove, with Skylight, that the problem is not on the server. We can prove that the problem is not on the network. We can prove that the problem is due to the database's structure. When we put the diagram in front of the distributor he says, "Ahh. Okay." And the database administrator can say, "Okay. Just add an index here, an index here," and after that, the product is good to go. So we have saved a lot of money there.

Before we had Skylight's analysis, the people who use the application would spend a lot of time in the application and would lose a lot of time waiting for it. After we proved that the problem is the application, and after fixing the problem, its speed improved a lot.

It's difficult to quantify the money we have saved with it, because it's money for a server, it's money for the time of the people involved with the application, it's money for the time of our networker equipment, etc.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Pricing is a little bit expensive.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I tried SolarWinds before, but it's more expensive.

What other advice do I have?

I used the first version, it was called Secure Active. After that, its name was Performance Vision. And now it's Skylight.

With each new version of Skylight, there are a lot of new features.

I am the principal user of Skylight. When anybody in the service - about 20 people - has a problem, they come to me and I generate the reports. But I'm the only one who uses SkyLIGHT.

We don't have any plans to expand usage as of now.

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Viet Dzung Nguyen

Business Development Manager at ISTT

Oct 4, 2022

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Has a user-friendly GUI and good analytics features

Pros and Cons

"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."

"Because of the policies in Vietnam, we cannot connect the system to the Accedian cloud. It would be good if Accedian could provide a local cloud. In the next release, I would like them to focus on improving and adding more reporting features. This will help the operations teams."

What is our primary use case?

My client uses Accedian Skylight for monitoring their IP network, that is, for application performance management and network monitoring.

What is most valuable?

I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate.

What needs improvement?

Because of the policies in Vietnam, we cannot connect the system to the Accedian cloud. It would be good if Accedian could provide a local cloud.

In the next release, I would like them to focus on improving and adding more reporting features. This will help the operations teams.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been working with this solution for more than two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Accedian Skylight is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

Accedian Skylight's technical support is acceptable, and on a scale from one to ten, I would give them a rating of eight.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is not too complex.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer.

What other advice do I have?

It's a good product, and I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner

reviewer2067840

Senior Tachnical Lead at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jan 25, 2023

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Preforms well, detailed documentation, and helpful support

Pros and Cons

"The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors."

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

What is our primary use case?

The solution can be deployed on the cloud or on-premise.

What is most valuable?

The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors.

What needs improvement?

The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Accedian Skylight for approximately 10 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Accedian Skylight is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable.

How are customer service and support?

I have used the support from Accedian Skylight and they are helpful.

I rate the support from Accedian Skylight a ten out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Accedian Skylight is simple. Anyone can complete the implementation because the documentation is detailed.

When upgrading a customer's production network, typically it takes approx eight hours, though it may be as little as two or three hours depending on the customer's requirements.

What was our ROI?

The solution is worst the money. We have received a good ROI. If did not receive a good ROI we would not have been using it for 10 years.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution to others. The solution provides good support and we have not experienced any problems. The support typically resolves issues within 24 hours.

I rate Accedian Skylight a ten out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user172716

Network Manager with 51-200 employees

Feb 10, 2015

Performance Vision is our primary tool for troubleshooting; there are many cases in which it gave us a clear diagnostic.

We had already invested in network & application performance monitoring a few years ago, but our team felt that it was critical to enlarge the scope of analysis of our existing solution, get better retention times and adapt our tooling to a datacenter which is now mostly virtualized. It was also important for our team to rely on a solution which would be able to cope with the volume of data of our datacenter and offer a much more intuitive access to troubleshooting data.

With the experience we already had, the objectives were clear:

Be able to troubleshoot reactively (with relevant data on past degradations)
Analyze usage and performance trends through time
Get an instant overview of the status of the critical applications
Provide other teams (systems, application) with relevant data to optimize performance
Help migration and changes with clear network usage information to facilitate the configuration of network devices (firewalls and filtering in the datacenter)

This need became urgent and we decided to take a new look at the market and realized that we could get a much better service than the one rendered by our Visual Performance Manager tools, at a much more favorable rate. We went into a test phase to look at different products in parallel and Performance Vision cumulated many advantages compared to its competitors.

The decision has been easy to recommend to our management as, on top of all these advantages, Performance Vision could do much more for much less budget. The TCO of the migration remained way under the cost of maintenance of our former solution.

We use Performance Vision on a daily basis. We have a monitoring screen which displays the performance status of our critical applications and network links. With the simple color code, we know immediately if an application gets degraded.

Performance Vision is our primary tool for troubleshooting; there are many cases in which it gave us a clear diagnostic, which we would not have achieved without such a tool. We fixed many configuration issues on the name resolution service: as an example, one server was requesting the same DNS resolution 40 thousand times an hour to access its database server; we had the DNS cache configuration fixed and improved its performance dramatically.

We also use Performance Vision to help our team make better decisions, based on actual facts; as an example, we had a certificate issue with Google Chrome. This was not an issue at the time we launched a service, given the small market share of this browser. With Performance Vision, we have been able to show our development team that it became an issue given the share of this user agent among our actual users.

After a few months of use, our feeling is strongly positive. I would recommend Performance Vision to any IT manager in charge of a critical architecture. It improves our efficiency, helps deliver better service every day and guides us to the right decision. Furthermore the Post Installation Follow-up Service, we get from SecurActive’s partner, iBO Solutions, is excellent, and brings the adequate support to extend the use of Performance Vision; we can confirm that the training and certification of their integrators is rigorously done and translates into good service. We also appreciated receiving a new major version (with no extra cost) with great new features no more than 3 months after the integration of the solution. Performance Vision’s HTTP performance module has a very strong value and this confirms that we made the right choice by switching to Performance Vision and that we shall benefit from the continuous improvement of their solution.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.

it_user172728

ICT Manager with 51-200 employees

Dec 17, 2014

Beyond the savings of the IT team’s productivity, the reduction of the performance degradations has helped save money.

Despite their ability to monitor availability and resource consumption (CPU, RAM, Disk…), our SNMP monitoring tools (Microsoft SCOM) did not provide any useful information to deal with user complaints. “Wireshark”, which we used to use for firefighting operations, could not provide us with an easy way to understand the origin of an issue.

First, we felt the need to monitor proactively our IT usage, as well as the performance of both our network and applications. In case of complaint, we wanted to be able to quickly qualify:

Which application was impacted? Which users were impacted? When?
Was our WAN network overloaded? By which applications?
Was there any abnormal behavior on our network (virus or worm)?

Second, due to the limited WAN capacities with a maximum of 10Mbps per connection, we needed to fully understand our network usage: which application was using which capacity and when? The objectives were to be able to anticipate congestions and their nasty consequences on our users and to get the right information to optimize our network and its usage.

Our IT infrastructure partner, AB Network, presented Performance Vision from SecurActive, which seemed to respond to our requirements. To validate its capabilities in a real life environment, we organized a proof of concept with AB Network. The conclusion was fully positive!

Each collaborator of the IT team has a full access to the solution. Each of us looks at the information he needs to execute his tasks: two developers, two people in charge of the infrastructure administration, one person in charge of the relationship between industrial engineering and IT, and myself:

Our developers use Performance Vision to troubleshoot performance issues on our http applications which are critical for our users located across all our sites to access to our databases. A good example is our planning software: this application is accessed from several sites by users from different companies within the group. It connects to several ERPs to consolidate planning information for several countries. Performance Vision helped optimize its performance by providing a clear understanding of how the application chain works.
The administrators in charge of the infrastructure monitor specifically the WAN usage and the bandwidth consumption. A recent example was the identification of a malfunction inside our antivirus architecture: in principle our antivirus system is composed of servers located on each of our four main sites. A configuration issue made that some clients communicated with the antivirus server of a different site and overloaded the WAN network.
My team access to the data from the three probes distributed on our main sites through a single graphical interface, which is particularly intuitive.
There are many examples of diagnostics run thanks to Performance Vision: without this tools, these incidents would have had strong consequences on our business. With Performance Vision, our administrators have been able to quickly pinpoint the origin of the issue and to solve it:
Citrix Performance degradation: some time ago, we received a growing number of complaints from users based on Poland trying to connect to our central applications. We could quickly identify that the performance was degraded for the Citrix flow only and not for the applications themselves. We identified that the slowdown of the Citrix flows was due to the configuration of our PDM/PLM application, which was using too much bandwidth during office hours.
We have a file synchronization software which runs over multiple sites. Our sites have different bandwidth available depending on the number of users present on each site. Thanks to Performance Vision’s reporting, we tuned the configuration of this software to manage this synchronization on all our sites, without any harm to our daily business operations.

Our team is currently working on a degradation that appeared on a customized application which relies on VB6 to query our SQL databases. I have no doubt that we will find the necessary elements to solve this problem in a very short timeframe.

On my end, I read a daily report to validate that our response times (application, network, and bandwidth) are fine. Automated, these reports represent no additionally workload for my team and allow us to share an objective history of our network & application performances and usage.

After 15 months of use, our feeling is strongly positive. I recommend Performance Vision to other IT directors on a regularly basis, to have a good visibility on the network and to diagnose or optimize the performance of their IT. It is a key element to help our teams to efficiently collaborate both at the development and infrastructure levels.

Beyond the savings gained on the IT team’s productivity, the reduction of the performance degradations for the business users, the monitoring of our bandwidths and the optimization of our applications, Performance Vision also helped saving the money we would otherwise have spent in the upgrade of our WAN network.

it_user172719

Network Manager at a local government with 51-200 employees

Dec 17, 2014

No more than half a day, and we were getting relevant information that was fully intuitive.

Our team is in charge of the network routing and quality of access of the different applications. As part of our mission, we need to visualize the flows towards our datacenter and to monitor the response times of all applications for each of the 300 remote sites.

In 2011, we started to look for a tool capable of addressing our needs. We selected a few products and tested them intensively on our datacenter: some proved to be good at protocol analysis but way too complex to manage for our needs; they would have required more dedicated resources than we could afford. All reports had to be created from zero and were not available “out of the box” (reporting was indeed an important feature for the Police Headquarters). Other solutions only covered a portion of our needs, because they were based on active QoS /compression devices and were not rendering the necessary diagnostic and analysis capabilities.

In the end we selected Performance Vision based on its strengths which fit well with our needs: In no more than a half day, we were getting relevant information and could use the product; The drill down access to information was fully intuitive; The tool was adapted to all our team (including punctual / light users); The network context (geographical and IP addressing plans) was perfectly translated into the interface and reports.

Moreover, Performance Vision offered an easy way to automate the distribution of graphical response time reports to all our IT staff located on each remote site; the information provided was easily understood by them and required little additional information from our team.

For diagnostics, Performance Vision outperforms our previous sniffer solutions and Netflow collectors! We started by making an assessment of all applications to understand their respective behavior: we pointed out a certain number of conception defects, which had a negative impact on users despite good server and network performance. We also built a baseline and determined the normal behavior of each application. We also implemented a daily reporting on our most critical applications to check that their performance andbehavior remained in line with the baseline.

Secondly, we proceeded to a large "house cleaning" operation: we got rid of large volumes of DNS errors, corrected the configuration of many workstations (which were using bad URLs or IP addresses for updates), as well as the one of certain servers relying on IP addresses instead of domain names, etc…

Performance Vision is an easy-to-use product; its administration requires very little time. Of course, Performance Vision provides data which has to be interpreted (e.g. one of our critical applications has very good response time per transaction but it involves a large number of transactions per user). The training is a key element in the project: as far as we are concerned, it got delivered in our context, on our own data. It has been very efficient and has quickly put us in a position where we can efficiently understand the information we are getting.

Overall, our experience has been brilliant: we consider Performance Vision as a very good product which fits our initial wishes. It is simple to use, provides a lot of relevant information. Upfront, it is very easy to use for network administrators and provides well designed reports for other IT staff members. We keep on enriching its configuration and using it on a daily basis. We have the project to extend its coverage through an additional virtual probe to analyze network traffic on remote sites (to analyze the application flows which cannot be viewed from our datacenter and diagnose local issues on remote sites)”.

it_user192357

Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 10, 2015

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It permits me to quickly identify the source of performance slowdowns, saving precious time analyzing.

What is most valuable?

The Performance feature is the one I use the most because it permits me to quickly identify the source of performance slowdowns.

How has it helped my organization?

Performance Vision saves time diagnosing performance problems. It also anticipates where investment is needed by pointing to the infrastructure limitations.

What needs improvement?

The licensing of the virtual pollers is problematic because they are attached to the physical ESX on which they are installed. An ESX fleet can quickly become overloaded with data so we do not see everything all the time. It still lacks integration with a RADIUS server so we have to do without creating local accounts.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have worked with the SecurActive solution for six to seven years (first as NSS then Performance Vision).

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No, the deployment is very simple.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not to date. It does it’s job.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have not had big changes with our system in recent months.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

It is very good. We have had quick access to developers in case of problems.

Technical Support:

It is very good. We have had quick access to developers in case of problems.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No.

How was the initial setup?

The initial configuration is very simple. There is a little information you need to understand to render the solution operational, only the time it takes to receive traffic, but it still requires a good mastery of the infrastructure to customize the product and analyzse the data.

What about the implementation team?

The product was implemented with the aid of SecurActive who have a good level of expertise with the solution.

What was our ROI?

It is difficult to evaluate, but what is certain is that the solution saves precious time in analyzing our slowness problems.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I do not know the cost of installation as it was installed on my arrival. The cost using it is difficult to determine as the product mainly saves time. You do need to keep up to date with the product, approximately half an hour per month.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No.

What other advice do I have?

It is important to customize the product so that the data that is provided is relevant.