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Catchpoint vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 1, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Juniper Mist Premium Analytics
Sponsored
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
58th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Catchpoint
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
56th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (43rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (33rd), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (8th)
Cisco Provider Connectivity...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
39th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (33rd)
 

Featured Reviews

ALEXANDRE VIANNA - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a single dashboard, but is expensive
We use this solution to manage our mission environment The single dashboard is a valuable feature.  The technical support needs improvement. The initial setup is straightforward. The solution is expensive. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.  Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of…
Carl Funk - PeerSpot reviewer
The UI is well designed, so it's easy to get the visibility you want.
There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing. The other issue is the cost. The more data you collect, the more expensive it becomes. You sell your organization by saying we can get this feature set, but then you have to walk that back because we'll need more money to run every test. This is something hard to get out in your initial scoping. You provide Catchpoint with a series of tests and get a cost estimate, not realizing all the data you might have to collect long term. That was a big deal for us because we partly switched on the promise of saving money.
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

"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"The thing I like most is the tech support in this company, because they have 24/7 chat support. We can chat immediately and ask them about an issue and they keep responding. They create tickets on our behalf and respond."
"Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn."
"The most valuable features of Catchpoint are basically the transaction monitors on the API and UI."
"The solution offers three different ways of slicing data to look for abnormalities."
"Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial."
"The best feature in Catchpoint is the alert or the notification my company gets frequently, in particular, every five minutes. It's the notification you get whenever a respective market has an issue. There's also a dashboard in Catchpoint that shows the markets you support, so all the markets will be highlighted graphically in the dashboard whenever there's downtime that could affect you. If there's no issue for a specific market, it will be in green, so in this way, anybody would be able to understand which market has issues and which market has no issues through Catchpoint. The tool is very useful for monitoring activities."
"The drill-down feature of this product was very good. It allowed us to identify the exact page or area of the site that was causing our customers an issue."
"We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side."
"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."
"Capturing traffic [is very interesting]. Currently, with our configuration, we don't capture the payload of the packets, just the header. But when we want the body, the payload of the packets, we can do a PCAP, and then analyze it within Wireshark."
"It is about finding operational problems. When sites go down, we try to determine who is at fault. While there is not much finger-pointing, the solution is just trying to analyse when there is an outage and where do we start looking to fix it. The very nature of why organization chooses to use the solution is to accelerate the meantime to resolution and find where problems lie to get them rectified as quickly as possible."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"The response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"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."
"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."
"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."
 

Cons

"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"Catchpoint can be improved by focusing solely on network monitoring."
"It would be great if Catchpoint could incorporate its alerting system instead of relying on separate tools like ServiceNow."
"A large selection of nodes are available but it is a challenge to test reliably in China and the Middle East."
"The old user version was better, it was more user-friendly."
"A room for improvement in Catchpoint is that it lacks an automated page updating feature. My company receives all the alerts and notifications it needs, but the page doesn't update automatically. You need to manually refresh the page, so every five minutes you need to refresh it to see the most updated information. If there's an automated page refresh feature, that would help my company. It's a feature that Grafana has. The page auto-refreshes in Grafana, so you don't have to manually refresh the page. If that feature is implemented in Catchpoint, it'll be useful for the users. Another area for improvement in the tool is you have to do a manual task, for example, when you have a notification for a market, you get a zip code that the user could have entered, but if the zip code is incorrect, you have to manually go into Catchpoint and update that parameter, so that manual step is another area in the tool that needs improvement."
"There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing."
"We would like the script creation feature of this solution to be improved, as it currently requires a complicated manual process to update the scripts."
"The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats."
"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."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for 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."
"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."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"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."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links. It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."
"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."
"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."
"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."
"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
60%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
6%
Retailer
3%
Computer Software Company
39%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Juniper Mist Premium Analytics?
We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points.
What do you like most about Catchpoint?
Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SL...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?
The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models. Clients typically see significant operational a...
What needs improvement with Catchpoint?
The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats.
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 u...
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 increa...
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 c...
 

Also Known As

No data available
No data available
Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

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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 Catchpoint vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.