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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Datadog comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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

Cisco Provider Connectivity...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
40th
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
47th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (1st), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 4.2%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.2%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance1.0%
Other94.8%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Pifu Lin - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at DYNASAFE TECHNOLOGIES PTE. LTD.
Addresses connectivity issues with real-time monitoring while offering good local support
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 quality use. This involves addressing network device issues, specifically Cisco network devices One…
Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Customer Service: Very good. Technical Support: Excellent and responsive."
"The pricing of Accedian Skylight is really good; the sensors are low cost, their licensing model lets clients start small and grow as they need without being forced into expensive appliances or subscription models, and that is one of the things that we really like about offering it to our clients because they are not left out getting the right sort of information straightaway."
"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..."
"Skylight is not used on a daily basis, but when it's used it usually helps to fix a problem pretty fast."
"It is very stable, has reduced downtime and migration time, and with Skylight we never forget anything."
"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."
"APM analysis is much faster than traditional root cause analysis of application problems."
"The response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"Flame graphs are pretty useful for understanding how GraphQL resolves our federated queries when it comes to identifying slow points in our requests. In our microservice environment with 170 services."
"I have found error reporting and log centralization the most valuable features, and overall Datadog provides a full package solution."
"Datadog has given us near-live visibility across our entire cloud platform."
"Datadog documentation on web pages has improved a lot and is pretty easy to follow and find."
"While my team is relatively new to Datadog, I already see immense value in switching over to Datadog as the primary APM and NPM tool."
"Datadog was a way simpler solution to setting up browser and API tests quickly."
 

Cons

"The licensing of the virtual pollers is problematic because they are attached to the physical ESX on which they are installed."
"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."
"Support for more VoIP systems, Avaya, etc."
"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."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"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."
"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."
"Embed a warning system to a mailbox when it exceeds the threshold for use of bandwidth over a given period of time."
"We have found that some of the different options for filtering for logs ingestion, APM traces and span ingestion, and RUM sessions vs replay settings can be hard to discover and tough to determine how to adjust and tweak for both optimal performance and monitoring as well as for billing within the console."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"The product needs a better Datadog agent installation."
"Support via tickets is absolutely terrible. It's the one obvious bad spot for Datadog."
"The application performance monitoring module had very few functionalities that we needed for the application health check."
"Sometimes, it takes a long time to load the dashboard if we have many charts."
"We need to learn more about the session reply feature inside of DD."
"Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"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."
"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."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"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'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."
"The price is better than some competing products."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
13%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise100
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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 ...
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...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample 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
Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
919,586 professionals have used our research since 2012.