Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Dynatrace comparison

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 1, 2024

Dynatrace and Accedian Skylight compete in the application performance management category. Dynatrace has the upper hand due to its advanced AI capabilities.

What features are offered by Dynatrace in comparison to Accedian Skylight?

Dynatrace offers AI-driven performance monitoring, detailed analytics, and automated root cause analysis. Accedian Skylight offers network performance insights, visibility into network health, and real-time monitoring.

What areas of improvement can be found in Dynatrace in comparison to Accedian Skylight?

Dynatrace could improve its integration options, customization capabilities, and user interface complexity. Accedian Skylight needs better documentation, an enhanced user experience, and more comprehensive reporting features.

How is the ease of deployment and customer service of Dynatrace in comparison to Accedian Skylight?

Dynatrace’s deployment is swift and straightforward, with solid customer support, though users sometimes find it complex. Accedian Skylight has smooth deployment but receives mixed feedback on support quality.

What setup costs and ROI can be seen with Dynatrace in comparison to Accedian Skylight?

Dynatrace users acknowledge higher setup costs but feel that the advanced features justify the expense through substantial ROI. Accedian Skylight users find its cost-effective pricing model appealing, but ROI feedback suggests varied experiences.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Dynatrace Report (Updated: September 2024).

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Dynatrace

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Categories and Ranking

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

33rd

Average Rating

9.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (45th)

Dynatrace

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Number of Reviews

343

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (4th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.3%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 13.6%, down from 15.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

reviewer1371603

Manager IT Production Service at a maritime company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jun 17, 2020

Reduced our migration time and downtime

We use it for troubleshooting, e.g., when we are currently in an IT territory migration, we can check if there is a computer or server using the old domain controller to analyze the network traffic. We can find it faster than the computer using the old domain group. It's more efficient to change it for the network migration this way, and Skylight accelerates this. 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.

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Varaprasad

Senior Technical Lead

Mar 22, 2023

Saves money; easy to deploy

Our primary use case for this solution is for checking site vulnerability to see if the applications are up or down and if they're running fine This solution has helped our organization by allowing us to check for site vulnerability and performance, which in the end helps us save money. The most…

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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 response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."

"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."

"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 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."

"This solution has helped to improve the interaction between our network, datacenter, and application teams. I have used other tools, but this tool can pinpoint the root cause of my application or network issue in the majority of the cases. So, it helps different divisions or groups in the IT department to troubleshoot together and get an issue resolved. This tool helps a lot in our day-to-day networking application and IT operations."

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

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"Data analytics help us to find us issues in the short-term or long-term."

"In terms of AI, I love the base-lining Dynatrace provides us. It baselines the application over a seven-day period; we have it at the default of seven days. The artificial intelligence is so amazing because it can automatically track each transaction and their response times: how much CPU they use, how much memory, resources that they use. If there’s any deviation from that Dynatrace will tell me like right away. If there’s a deployment and the deployment has increased response time or is taking up CPU or has caused a memory leak, I can say, “Hey guys, you need to look at this, it’s this function on this page in this microservice, in this docker container. You need to go here, you need to fix it, it’s not going live.” It has just increased our productivity off the charts."

"I get valuable information like, for example, if a site is down. That's the key. I'm instantly getting a message, or even on the app, I can see if something overnight went down a few times, or it's not performing at 100%."

"During the building of a system that is new, there are a lot of bugs. Being in the cloud it is very difficult, sometimes, to diagnose where the issues are. Dynatrace gives us that deep insight into errors."

"The User Sessions Query language has definitely been the most helpful with its key user actions and user session properties. Using those together, that has completely transformed how we're able to identify customers and their problems on our site. It has made a very big impact over the year."

"For me, the most valuable feature of this solution is that deep dive that we get out of the AppMon product with the PurePath technology, and the way that the PurePath stack works."

"We have been using it to find bugs in our production environment."

"Reduced MTTR, thanks to smart problem detection and automated root cause analysis."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."

"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."

"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."

"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 UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"Nginx monitoring service did not work out-of-the-box, so we had to tinker with it for quite some time."

"Our primary wish list for RFEs or feature requests are additional integration options with ticketing systems. Although, we are able to work around it, 'ticketing' is not a core function of the product."

"I find it is very difficult to train someone in using this application. As amazing as it can be, the learning curve is extensive."

"The Web UI can be slow and hard to understand."

"They could spend more time and effort in creating brand awareness."

"The solution could improve by allowing more dashboards customization. This would allow us to monitor the metric better."

"Configuring nodes and agents should be more like plug and play."

"I would love to see a better data export, because AppMon's charting capabilities leaves a lot to be desired. You have about a 5,000 line limit. I would really like to see the ability to export, in Dynatrace and AppMon, in essentially in a nice format of whatever you want to whatever else."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."

"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."

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

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"While it is quite good in respect to its functionality, there are few area in regards to pricing that they can look at how to possibly change. I have heard it's costly."

"Setup cost is very low considering that it is an almost totally, automatic process."

"We purchased a subscription for one year and it is an expensive solution for a large enterprise like ours."

"Surprisingly, it is quite expensive. That is something that we could always see: Improved pricing and the overall construct on how do we use each license in regards to usage of the tool."

"The pricing is not bad, but it could be better."

"There is time savings. People's times have been cut in half using this solution because we were previously doing a lot of that manual work. Now, it's a lot more automated, and the data is just there."

"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace is excellent."

"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."

More Dynatrace pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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801,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

40%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

31%

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

Any advice about APM solutions?

The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...

What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?

While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...

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...

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

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Compared 5% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

New Relic vs Dynatrace

Compared 9% of the time

AppDynamics vs Dynatrace

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Dynatrace

Compared 8% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

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Also Known As

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

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Cisco

Overview

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.

Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.
OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.
PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

What does Dynatrace offer?

Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.
Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.
Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.
Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

Reviews from Real Users

Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

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

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Dynatrace