Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) comparison

Cisco and Google are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Cisco is ranked #33 with an average rating of 9.0, while Google is ranked #22 with an average rating of 7.8. Cisco holds a 0.3% mindshare in APM, compared to Google’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Google users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 23 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

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100% willing to recommend

Google Cloud's operations s...

Read 10 Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) reviews

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2,955 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Google Cloud's operations s...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 1, 2024

Google Cloud's operations suite and Accedian Skylight are key players in the cloud monitoring and performance management category. Google Cloud's operations suite has the upper hand with its seamless integration within the Google ecosystem, while Accedian Skylight shines in detailed network performance metrics.

Features: Google Cloud's operations suite offers comprehensive logging, monitoring, and diagnostics, efficient alerting system, and real-time data analytics. Accedian Skylight provides in-depth network performance insights, detailed metrics for diagnosing network issues, and advanced performance analytics features.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest that Google Cloud's operations suite needs more intuitive configuration settings, improved documentation, and usability enhancements. Accedian Skylight users point to a more user-friendly setup process, better scalability options, and deployment efficiency improvements.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Google Cloud's operations suite is straightforward to deploy for those familiar with Google Cloud platform and benefits from robust customer support by Google. Accedian Skylight's deployment is more complex, requiring detailed network configurations, but users find its customer support responsive.

Pricing and ROI: Google Cloud's operations suite is favored for its competitive pricing, especially for organizations using other Google services, offering significant value for money. Accedian Skylight, perceived as more expensive, provides strong ROI due to its specialized performance insights and diagnostics tools.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

October 2024

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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 (39th)

Google Cloud's operations s...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

22nd

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (24th), Cloud Monitoring Software (21st)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 1.5%, down from 1.8% 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

Jan 9, 2023

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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Anand_Patel

Senior Technical Architect at T-Systems International GmbH

May 17, 2024

Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations

As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or BigQuery can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings.

Read full review

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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports."

"Provides visibility into the performance uptime."

"It's easy to use."

"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."

"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."

"Offers a valuable logging transport feature"

"We find the solution to be stable."

"Google's technical support is very good."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"The logging functionality could be better."

"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."

"It could be even more automated."

"The process of logging analytics can be improved"

"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver."

"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."

"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."

"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) cons

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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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 cost could be lower."

"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."

"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

39%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Google Stackdriver?

It's easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Stackdriver?

This is a very cheap product.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Stackdriver?

If the errors are caught early in the interface, it would be easier for users to manage. The process of logging analytics can be improved.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 47% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 10% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 28% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

New Relic vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon CloudWatch vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

November 2024

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

November 2024

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) report

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Also Known As

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

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring

Learn More

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Cisco

Google

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.

Real-time log management and analysis

Cloud Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and platform log data, as well as custom log data from GKE environments, VMs, and other services inside and outside of Google Cloud. Get advanced performance, troubleshooting, security, and business insights with Log Analytics, integrating the power of BigQuery into Cloud Logging.

Built-in metrics observability at scale

Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. Collect metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components. Visualize this data on charts and dashboards and create alerts so you are notified when metrics are outside of expected ranges.

Stand-alone managed service for running and scaling Prometheus

Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, built on top of the same globally scalable data store as Cloud Monitoring. Keep your existing visualization, analysis, and alerting services, as this data can be queried with PromQL or Cloud Monitoring.

Monitor and improve your application's performance

Application Performance Management (APM) combines the monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler to help you reduce latency and cost so you can run more efficient applications.

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

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

October 2024

Free Report: Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

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