Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Elastic Observability comparison

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Elastic Observability

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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

45th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (43rd)

Elastic Observability

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Log Management (15th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 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 Elastic Observability is 5.4%, down from 5.7% 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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Adelina Craciun

Product Owner at Swisscom

Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments

The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.

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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

"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."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"The solution has been stable in our usage."

"All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important."

"We can view and connect different sources to the dashboard using it."

"The solution is open-source and helps with back-end logging. It is also easy to handle."

"The tool's most valuable feature is centralized logging. Elastic Common Search helps us to search for the logs across the organization."

"I recommend Elastic Observability for its completeness of vision and wide ecosystem."

"Good design and easy to use once implemented."

"We use AppDynamics and Elastic. The reason why we're using Elastic APM is because of the license count. It's very favorable compared to AppDynamics. It's inexpensive; it's economical."

More Elastic Observability pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

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

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"Elastic Observability’s price could be improved."

"They need more skills in the market. There are not enough skills in the market. It is not pervasive enough on the market, in my opinion. In other words, there isn't a big enough user base."

"The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome."

"If we had some pre-defined templates for observability that we could start using right away after deploying it – instead of having to build or to change some of the dashboards – that would be helpful."

"The solution would be better if it was capable of more automation, especially in a monitoring capacity or for the response to abnormalities."

"The cost must be made more transparent."

"It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side."

"Elastic Observability needs to improve the retrieval of logs and metrics from all the instances."

More Elastic Observability cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

"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."

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

"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."

"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."

"The product is not that cheap."

"We will buy a premium license after POC."

"Elastic Observability's pricing could be better for small-scale users."

"We have been using the open-source version."

"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."

"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."

More Elastic Observability pricing and cost advice

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845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

40%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 ...

What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?

Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?

Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing. However, sizing and licensing information could be clearer.

What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?

Of course, maintenance is necessary, as with any software, requiring updates with the latest features and security enhancements. It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like netw...

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Comparisons

Compared 45% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 16% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 10% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 8% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

New Relic vs Elastic Observability

Compared 15% of the time

Sentry vs Elastic Observability

Compared 14% of the time

Dynatrace vs Elastic Observability

Compared 13% of the time

Grafana vs Elastic Observability

Compared 9% of the time

Zabbix vs Elastic Observability

Compared 8% of the time

More Elastic Observability Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Elastic Observability

Download Elastic Observability product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

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.

Cisco

Elastic Observability is primarily used for monitoring login events, application performance, and infrastructure, supporting significant data volumes through features like log aggregation, centralized logging, and system metric analysis.

Elastic Observability employs Elastic APM for performance and latency analysis, significantly aiding business KPIs and technical stability. It is popular among users for system and server monitoring, capacity planning, cyber security, and managing data pipelines. With the integration of Kibana, it offers robust visualization, reporting, and incident response capabilities through rapid log searches while supporting machine learning and hybrid cloud environments.

What are Elastic Observability's key features?

Economic licensing: Offers cost-effective plans.
Extensive metrics tracking: Helps in comprehensive system monitoring.
Comprehensive logging: Centralizes log data efficiently.
Performance Monitoring: Provides robust APM capabilities.
Integration: Seamlessly integrates with other solutions.
Kibana visualization: Facilitates data visualization and reporting.
Machine learning support: Enables advanced data analysis.
Flexible deployment: Supports various deployment environments.
Rapid log searches: Enhances quick incident response.
Accessibility: Offers extensive online documentation and connector support.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in Elastic Observability reviews?

Stability: Look for consistent performance and reliability.
Compliance: Effective monitoring aids in regulation adherence.
System Security: Enhanced system monitoring and alert management.
Cost-Effectiveness: Evaluate the economic pricing models.
Scalability: Adequate scalability options for growing needs.

Companies in technology, finance, healthcare, and other industries implement Elastic Observability for tailored monitoring solutions. They find its integration with existing systems useful for maintaining operation efficiency and security, particularly valuing the visualization capabilities through Kibana to monitor KPIs and improve incident response times.

Elastic

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

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Elastic Observability