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AppDynamics vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 24, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

AppDynamics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
156
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (3rd)
Cisco Provider Connectivity...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
32nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (37th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AppDynamics is 5.2%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.3%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Noorul Mustafa Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Widely used by most financial services sectors, such as banking and insurance sectors
Currently, the solution is on the cloud as well. You can have your cloud applications onboarded to AppDynamics without any issues. AppDynamics has its own SaaS environment and SaaS controller on which you can onboard your application. You will need to install some of the AppDynamics agents. I used to contact the tools team, and they used to answer our queries mostly. If not, they used to take it to the support and then come back with their solution. Users need to list all the servers related to their application on which they want the AppDynamics agents installed. Depending on whether your application is cloud-based or non-cloud, you need to list all your servers. Then, a further installation process would be recommended. To use AppDynamics, you need to understand the different flows. If an issue is currently ongoing, you need to check which GUI flow is being used. If you want previous data, it will be in the history, and that's a different flow. Working with the tool is tricky, but two to three weeks of continuous work on it should bring you up to date. Suppose you are working in a bank. For your application, you can configure everything regarding the business transaction. For balance transfers, you can have one business transaction that will monitor balance transfers. There can be another business transaction that can monitor credit cards. You can configure different flows and transactions within the flows in terms of business transactions. Wherever there is an issue, that exact business transaction will start developing. The integration of AppDynamics within our CI/CD pipeline has positively affected our deployment frequency and application quality. Whenever there is a deployment or release, we see some hiccups in AppDynamics. There will be some things going on on that server, which we can easily identify in AppDynamics. Only after we validate that do we give the next go. Overall, I rate the solution eight and a half out of ten.
Sylvain Germe - PeerSpot reviewer
Highly scalable, responsive support, but lacking new features
This solution is geared towards on-premise setups, and would not be useful if the company plans to move to the cloud within the next two years, such as Google Cloud for example. If the goal is to monitor bandwidth at remote sites and identify performance issues because the network is under the control, this solution is useful. However, if a company primarily uses cloud-based servers and does not manage the internet connection of its remote sites, the solution becomes less useful. I rate Accedian Skylight a seven out of ten. I have a positive opinion of the tool, but it can be challenging to set up. It is also limited in its applicability to certain use cases. I am familiar with the engineers behind the solution and have a good impression of them. However, I am not pleased with the fact that the company removed many features and raised prices after it was acquired by Accedian.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the ability to take a report, and in particular, a visual, and link it to actual application performance and then the consequences. This means you can show how an incident or action has an effect on the business."
"The transaction snapshots are the most valuable feature of AppDynamics"
"We are able to correlate performance between tiers."
"AppDynamics is scalable."
"It is a stable solution."
"AppDynamics provides us with detailed information about the performance of the underlying infrastructure, including servers, databases, and external services."
"The features that I like best are the dashboard and Business Journey."
"I like that AppDynamics allows every organization to have what they want to see, like for my organization, we're able to customize the dashboard to show us details of what we want to see in our transactions."
"For us, the most valuable feature is something called TWAMP that allows for real-time traffic in a way that is 10 times lighter than things like SolarWinds. It's in the sub-milliseconds of accuracy, and you can divide tasks so that you can literally see things like the tagging for Quality of Service. That had been incorrect with the carrier, but there was no way on this planet you'd be able to tell a carrier that they're wrong. I have dozens of scenarios where we found "No, that's not right," and got it resolved instantly."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"The feature I used to like the most was its ability to decode layer seven protocols, although this is becoming less useful now that encryption is so widespread."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"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."
"The response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"If [the problem] is something related to HTTP or VoIP, then I can have a quick look into the protocols, a process which gives me some good ideas..."
"What I like most about Accedian Skylight is that it's a UI application, so using it is easy. I also like that the support for Accedian Skylight is helpful."
 

Cons

"An area that has room for improvement on the CR and ERP would be the addition of monitoring of the internal solution. For example, you can monitor the day-to-day and everything in the transactions with AppDynamics, but there's also a lot going on in the kernel itself that you cannot monitor. The automation needs to improve as well. As it stands, a lot of customization needs to happen before you can use AppDynamics."
"There could log management features included in the product."
"The infrastructure is not as good as other solutions."
"They are using Flash for their website, which is very slow. We had hoped the website would be much faster to use, and that is definitely what we want to see."
"The AppDynamics installation process needs to be more straightforward. Deploying the product is also tricky."
"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."
"I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning brought in to monitor the statement and payment sum issues we have."
"I would like to see something that lets me set real dollar figures, not just to outages, but to the solutions as well... when I'm looking at problems and have found a problem that I know I need to address. I could flag it off and have AppDynamics estimate how long a person would have taken to find that without it. That would give me a lot of leverage for justifying the existence of APM, which I really need."
"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"Some of the Skylight applications are a little newer, and they're still moving through initial revs. There are certain bugs, but nothing is insurmountable... It will just take a little bit of time for their user interface to get a little bit better."
"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."
"It's a bit slow. When I execute a query, something general with a short timeframe that covers one month, for instance, and I do not specify the IP source or IP destination, it can take ages because it has to query the whole database."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"If you want a new version, you go to the website. The hardest part is finding the link, where is that .bin file? Sometimes it's pretty hidden in a document... it's hidden in the release notes or in another file somewhere. And it's usually not on the first page either."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our purchasing experience through the AWS Marketplace has been pretty painless."
"AppDynamics is one of the most expensive solutions on the market."
"As compared to other applications, its price is moderate. Its price is neither very high nor very low."
"As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs."
"Take into consideration what you get for specific pricing models and how much it costs to add on things you may need later.​"
"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good."
"The way it is structured in terms of price could be better. You pay for individual modules and that adds on to the cost, which detracts you from implementing those modules and slows you down."
"AppDynamics is priced on the higher side."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."
"If you look into Riverbed, it's a licensing nightmare. You need to pay for every type of analysis... If you don't look into licensing, Riverbed and SolarWinds are pretty comparable. But if you look into licensing it would not be smart to go for either of them. On the pure, bare-metal basis, it's the same. But when you get the bare metal and a few basic licenses, then you need all those other licenses just to be sure that there's no issue... One of the great things about Skylight is you have them all, and you actually need them all."
"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
"The solution was previously well-regarded, but after being acquired by Accedian, the prices have significantly increased. This has made it challenging to sell the product due to its high cost. It is an expensive solution."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"The pricing of Accedian Skylight is really good. The sensors are low cost. Their model to analytics for sensors is by license, endpoint, or session. With the probes for their analytics, if they get deployed virtually, they are free. The licensing is only based on flows. So, you can effectively deploy probes everywhere in your network. Then, if you want to look at a specific type of traffic, you can enter into it with a very low cost license. You can just use things like spam ports, mirrors, TAPs, and aggregators to optimize what sort of traffic you send to these analysis tools. Then, if you want to start looking at more, you can up your licensed as you go. You are not getting forced into expensive appliances or subscription models."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
49%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Computer Software Company
39%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
What do you like most about Accedian Skylight?
The feature I used to like the most was its ability to decode layer seven protocols, although this is becoming less useful now that encryption is so widespread.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Accedian Skylight?
The solution was previously well-regarded, but after being acquired by Accedian, the prices have significantly increased. This has made it challenging to sell the product due to its high cost. It i...
What needs improvement with Accedian Skylight?
There should be an option to update and upgrade the solution to the new version without having to re-buy it. I have clients switching to other solutions. The old solution is great, but if you chang...
 

Also Known As

AppD, AppDynamics APM
Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
T-Systems, Thomson Reuters, Bordeaux Metropole, CGI, Citadelle Regional Hospital Center, Lorraine Institute of Oncology, Luxembourg Institute of Health, Groupe BPCE, Group S, Splitpoint, Horus-Net, Audatex, Indexis, Province de Liège, EASI, Spie Batignolles, Faymonville
Find out what your peers are saying about AppDynamics vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
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