Avada Software Infrared360 vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance comparison

Avada Software and Cisco are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Avada Software is ranked #77, while Cisco is ranked #45 with an average rating of 8.0. Avada Software holds a 0.1% mindshare in APM, compared to Cisco’s 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Avada Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

Avada Software Infrared360

Read 13 Avada Software Infrared360 reviews

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105 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

776 Views
495 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Avada Software Infrared360

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Avada Software Infrared360 and Accedian Skylight are both contenders in the network monitoring and analytics category. Accedian Skylight seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced analytics and superior customer service.

Features: Avada Software Infrared360 offers robust monitoring capabilities, customizable alerts, and good reporting tools. Accedian Skylight provides advanced analytics, comprehensive visibility into network performance, and real-time monitoring capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Avada Software Infrared360 can improve scalability, enhance report generation, and offer better integration features. Accedian Skylight can work on smoother integration with existing systems, a more intuitive setup process, and better user interface design.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Avada Software Infrared360 is relatively straightforward to deploy but has occasional delays in customer service. Accedian Skylight's deployment is efficient, and customer service is highly rated.

Pricing and ROI: Avada Software Infrared360 has competitive setup costs and satisfactory ROI. Accedian Skylight requires a higher initial investment but delivers strong ROI due to its advanced capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Avada Software Infrared360 vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Avada Software Infrared360 vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Avada Software Infrared360

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

77th

Average Rating

8.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Activity Monitoring (5th), Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) (11th), Server Monitoring (36th)

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

45th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (43rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Avada Software Infrared360 is 0.1%, up from 0.1% 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

it_user685326

Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

An offsite team performs a daily infrastructure health check and sends reports to the technical/management teams.

Administration, Monitoring, and Delegation are the most valuable features of the solution. * Administration: It provides a centralized audit trail of all the infrastructure changes. * Monitoring: It gives the ability to integrate with my company's global notification system, and the ability to proactively automate corrective actions. * Delegation: It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams.

Read full review

Sylvain Germe

Application and Network Performance Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The administration piece makes it very easy to do MQ administration. It gives us a lot more flexibility and capabilities."

"It's what we use for monitoring our MQ system, so the features that they provide are just really, really good."

"It has role-based access to queues, giving us more insights into problems."

"We have easily created use case testing harnesses for specific flows that incorporate various message types."

"Monitoring that ties into our incident management system"

"It allows non-technical users to inspect their individual components within the total infrastructure without disturbing other components and without bothering the technical teams."

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

"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..."

"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 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."

"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

Cons

"Some of the graphics in the interface could be improved. It's pretty basic. Some interfaces are not up to what you're used to seeing on other, more Windows-like tools."

"One area where they could improve is with their documentation. Some sections are not up to date with new release information and providing additional samples in some areas would be very helpful."

"We are still working with the FTE/MFT subscription monitoring and reporting functionality. That is an area in which we would like to see further development taking place."

"We desire a dashboard that could accumulate BOQ lengths per tenant on one screen for all tenants."

"The UI can be cumbersome - but we are still using the Viper interface and we have not had the time to check out the Alloy interface which is supposed to be much improved."

"The user interface could be sexier and more ergonomic. The competing products have similar problems."

"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."

"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 change your license to a new one, you have to almost re-buy it completely."

"I would like to see some improvements in parts of their synthetic transactions, which includes all the latency, jitter, and throughput. I would like to see some Layer 7 analytics in there. I want to be able to do a DNS request, HTTP GET request, or even SIP call point-to-point or via registration."

"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."

"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."

"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."

"For the PVX, they are in the process of getting the results to export to cloud and SaaS for analytics. They told me that this will happen later this year. Right now, for the most part, I create that data myself."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Because the licensing is at the QMGR level, you need to have at least a small cushion of licenses for occasional enterprise needs."

"Avada Software's licensing metric is very good because the license fees are based on the number of connections (which have not increased for us very much over the years) rather than the CPU processing power (which increases significantly whenever our hardware is upgraded) or the number of users (which has increased for us a lot since our original purchase)."

"Start small, then increase licensing later as per your demand."

"Our internal budget calculation model incorporates the pricing per endpoint for any new projects. However, as our footprint for distributed queue managers shrinks as part of our shared middleware hub deployment, the initial licensing and support costs have been reduced over the last five years."

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

"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."

"It provides value and the cost is not huge."

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

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"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."

"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's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

41%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Hospitality Company

Computer Software Company

39%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

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What needs improvement with Accedian Skylight?

Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues. I require more tools to file and resolve these issues efficiently.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Accedian Skylight?

I had prepared for COC and the client. I work as a vendor for a client using Flow Mount for network performance monitoring. I focus on resolving client-side issues related to Packy Performance and ...

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What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM MQ vs Avada Software Infrared360

Compared 70% of the time

Dynatrace vs Avada Software Infrared360

Compared 30% of the time

More Avada Software Infrared360 Competitors

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 44% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 16% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 11% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 8% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Avada Software Infrared360

April 2025

Download Avada Software Infrared360 product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

April 2025

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Also Known As

Infrared360

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision

Overview

Avada Software specializes in Enterprise Middleware solutions. Founded by some pioneers in SOA, MQ and J2EE technology, Avada’s Flagship product, Infrared360, is a holistic & innovative private cloud enabled portal providing self-service administration, monitoring, load testing, auditing & statistical reporting for Enterprise Middleware including IBM’s middleware stack of MQ, IIB (message broker), WAS, and Datapower, as well as other applications servers such as JBoss, TC Server, Weblogic, and other messaging technologies such as Tibco EMS and Kafka*.

Accessed via any web browser on any device, Infrared360 is a single web application, yet scales to 2500+ endpoints without deploying anything (no agents, no scripts) to those endpoints.

Using trusted ‘spaces’ and delegated visibility and control, the portal uniquely provides different business units or even different application users virtual ‘spaces’ in which to work. Within those spaces are only the objects and resources the user has been granted visibility. Role policy dictates permissions on those resources.

It is the ONLY Enterprise Messaging Solution with a built in SOA engine that lets you leverage internal and external services for managing and correcting problems within your middleware messaging environment.

*Kafka coming soon

Avada Software

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers real-time application and network performance monitoring, VPN management, and network diagnostics across multiple sites.

Organizations use Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance for active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and troubleshooting performance issues. Deployed both on-premise and in the cloud, it supports IT infrastructure, security, and analytics with end-to-end performance measurement across cloud data centers. The modern, intuitive interface features TWAMP for real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reports, along with insightful dashboards for circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput monitoring.

What are the most important features?

TWAMP: Provides real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reporting.
Insightful Dashboards: Monitor circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput.
Security Integration: Compatible with tools like Splunk for enhanced security.
Application Support: Facilitates comprehensive network performance analysis.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Quick Corrective Actions: Immediate response capabilities for performance issues.
Easy Navigation: User-friendly layouts simplify monitoring and troubleshooting.
Comprehensive Analytics: Advanced tools for in-depth network performance insights.
Cloud and On-Premise Options: Flexible deployment to meet different needs.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance ensures robust performance monitoring and quick diagnostics for VPNs and internet lines. It aids in maintaining the integrity and security of data transference, facilitating active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and performance troubleshooting across geographically dispersed locations, ensuring seamless operation and compliance with industry standards.

Cisco

Sample Customers

USBank, Southwest Airlines, Visiting Nurse Services of New York, Aon Hewitt, Parker Hannifin, Cantonal Bank of Zurich (ZKB), Hagemeyer NA, and many others

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

Buyer's Guide

Avada Software Infrared360 vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

April 2025

Free Report: Avada Software Infrared360 vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

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