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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs OpenText Diagnostics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 24, 2024

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
47th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (43rd)
OpenText Diagnostics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
66th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 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 OpenText Diagnostics is 0.2%, down from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Sylvain Germe - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
RS
Very good for transaction level monitoring, but expensive and HP needs better support and training
HP Diagnostics is a very good monitoring tool especially for transaction level monitoring -- it shows hot spots which can be drilled down to DB level, table, query, SP's, record and field level and also at Object level, Classes level,method or Augment levels instead of pinpointing bottlenecks at layer level it goes deep inside for information. It has very good tracing capabilities despite being an agent based tool compared to other agent less monitoring tools. Overall a very good tool for monitoring application diagnostics for quick and easy resolution with help of thread information. Drills down from slow, end-user transactions to the bottle necked component, method, or SQL statement, helping to solve memory, exception, and other common problems Key features and benefits • Automatically detects all components touched by a business process and traces them with no user intervention • Provides complete application visibility across the application lifecycle, enabling higher application quality when applications go live • Reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) in your J2EE, .NET, ERP, or CRM (SAP, Oracle®, PeopleSoft) environment • Integrates fully with HP Business Availability Center software, HP LoadRunner, and HP Performance Center.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"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."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"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."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature of Micro Focus Diagnostics is the information reported from an application that has timed out. For example, when you're Googling, or you're booking a ticket for Burj Khalifa here, the longest tower in the world, there are situations where the system can time out. There are times when you might not receive a response on the payment gateway or you are not able to find the reservation. The customer only receives the information that the session has timed out."
"The diagnostics and configuration are the solution's most valuable aspects."
"For banking and telecom solutions, it's been quite useful."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"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."
"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."
"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"The GUI and metrics of Micro Focus Diagnostics can be improved. The metrics the solution gathers can be limited and could be enhanced by giving more details."
"The interface is very old, and not very user-friendly. Most of our clients don't like the UI."
"The interface could be more user friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
40%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Transportation Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
Micro Focus Diagnostics, MF Diagnostics
 

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
BSkyB, Alior Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. OpenText Diagnostics and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.