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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Datadog comparison

 

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
45th
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
45th
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
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 5.2%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog5.2%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance0.7%
Other94.1%
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

"Skylight is not used on a daily basis, but when it's used it usually helps to fix a problem pretty fast."
"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."
"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."
"It is not that expensive of a solution and produces tremendous value."
"APM analysis is much faster than traditional root cause analysis of application problems."
"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."
"Customer Service: Very good. Technical Support: Excellent and responsive."
"It is very stable, has reduced downtime and migration time, and with Skylight we never forget anything."
"The ease of use allowed me to get up to speed with log management since it's my first time using Datadog."
"Our return on investment is great and is so much better than CloudWatch."
"Several critical dashboards were created years ago and are still in use today."
"The stability is great."
"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"Session recordings have been the most valuable to me as it helps me gain insights into user behaviour at scale."
"Being able to click on a UI and be pointed to the exact source of the problem is like magic."
"Most of the features in the way Datadog does monitoring are commendable and that is the reason we choose it. We did some comparisons before picking Datadog. Datadog was recommended based on the features provided."
 

Cons

"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."
"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"I would like to see some improvements in parts of their synthetic transactions, which includes all the latency, jitter, and throughput."
"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."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"So scalability, at the moment, is pretty bad for us now, because our modus operandi have totally shifted."
"Combination with Avaya switches pose some problems."
"They could have better log reporting."
"I've found that the documentation is lacking in certain regards."
"We have asked technical support questions, and sometimes they don't get back to us right away. Or when they do, it is not the right answer."
"We primarily use the log management functionality, and the only feedback I have there is better fuzzy text searching in logs (the kind that Kibana has)."
"I find the training great. That said, it is set for the LCD (lowest common denominator)."
"It's not that straightforward when creating an alert. The syntax is a little confusing."
"I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
"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 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 price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

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 Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
 

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: April 2026.
885,837 professionals have used our research since 2012.