Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Dynatrace comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 24, 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: January 2025).

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Dynatrace

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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

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

34th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (36th)

Dynatrace

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

344

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.3%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 12.4%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

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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Manish Ved

Lead Infrastructure Domain Architect (Systems) at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Solution has a useful AI engine, but the reports could be a bit better

We are typically about a version or two behind. We are on the managed solution. Our model of deployment is on-premises. I would say there are a couple of thousand users of this solution in our company. We are also planning on increasing the usage as our apps migrate to the cloud. I would advise other people looking into solutions, to do their homework beforehand and not assume that by deploying all the tools everything will automatically work, so there's still a lot of configuration involved. I would rate this solution as a whole an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

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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 ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"This tool helps us gather information from all hosts and services, then cross reference the information."

"Smartscape is a wonderful feature. I'm really loving it because there's no need for you to go deep into an analysis and go in to see where we are going wrong. You go to Smartscape, pass all the connections, and it will tell you the root cause."

"PureStack, I just love it. It can give visibility from the end-user perspective right through to the code level. That's the most valuable feature."

"It is useful for analytics, web performance, end-to-end coverage of a user experience, and database analytics. It is absolutely a monitoring tool that is worth having. The visibility that it provides is a unique feature of this product."

"I am primarily doing DC RUM, so on that side there are a lot of awesome abilities where people who can't implement an agent are able to still monitor a lot of their apps and decodes."

"Metrics for CPU, memory, network, and disk. It provides extensive end-user, application, and infrastructure platform and technology support, including mobile, web browser, Java, .NET, PHP, servers, networks, and mainframe."

"Support was very quick to help us identify a problem and fix it immediately"

"We monitor end-to-end availability of the application and deep dive PurePath analysis of real user visits."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

"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."

"Because of the policies in Vietnam, we cannot connect the system to the Accedian cloud. It would be good if Accedian could provide a local cloud. In the next release, I would like them to focus on improving and adding more reporting features. This will help the operations teams."

"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."

"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 Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."

"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."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"I'd really like to see more dashboarding abilities. The ability to do workflows within dashboards, being able to start at a high level and click into it with custom dashboards. I think most of the time, we are creating our own custom dashboards, and I'd just like to see more ability with that."

"The usability is worse than it used to be."

"I also wish there was the ability to do alert filtering before it triggered an alert with PagerDuty/OpsGenie/Slack."

"They need a capability similar to Tealeaf where you can actually view what the consumer is doing and record the sessions. That is the biggest missing element."

"The one thing people really liked that we can do in AppMon is executive dashboards and, until recently, you couldn't even create the business transactions you need for the data at the back-end of those dashboards. But if I had to ask for one thing it would be: In the new platform, give me the ability to do dashboarding in the way it's done in AppMon, and I think that would bridge a lot of the missing pieces. If I could do the same type of executive dashboards on the walls, they would be happy."

"Some of the analytics that you get in, e.g., a waterfall analysis of a web page could be clearer. A lot of that is not directly attributable to Dynatrace. Sometimes a vendor will implement a tag or JavaScript plugin that's named something entirely different than what it does. This makes it difficult to track that from the waterfall list, figure out where exactly that component is, and dig more into what it's doing. Dynatrace could probably improve a bit on that waterfall layout to make it clearer as to what exactly is there. It does a wonderful job of telling you what loads and when, but it could be improved in terms of telling me what exactly it is loading."

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

"I would like a testing module focused on quality gates."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"It's more expensive than other solutions, but worth it. We use full APM monitoring on our primary systems, but only resource monitoring on lesser systems. We shift licenses around our environment when a deeper dive into lesser systems is required."

"Always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership."

"Pricing can be high, especially for Portuguese standards. But as one says, you get what you pay for."

"I would recommend doing a PoC."

"We have a three-year contract. We have 30 licenses for the full stack and 3 licenses for the DEM unit."

"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."

"Dynatrace is an expensive solution."

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

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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831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

40%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

34%

Financial Services Firm

17%

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?

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

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

Comparisons

Compared 46% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 7% of the time

AppDynamics vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 13% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

AppDynamics vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

New Relic vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

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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