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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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
24
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (43rd)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
27th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (29th), Container Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (22nd)
 

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 VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 0.8%, down from 1.0% 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.
ToniLindberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Troubleshooting capabilities have improved application monitoring and support engagement
I can see what happens end to end, which is pretty beneficial. The solution has troubleshooting capabilities, providing a direct connection to knowledge base articles from VMware Broadcom. When I encounter an error, I can search directly within the system to see what solutions have been employed by others. It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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..."
"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."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."
"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."
"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 response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"What I like most about Accedian Skylight is that it's a UI application, so using it is easy. I also like that the support for Accedian Skylight is helpful."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."
"For us, the ease of deployment in combination with TMZ was the most important part because we don't have to manually deploy a complex monitoring solution. We can more or less do that with the click of a button, and we are not dependent on the developers to provide us with all the necessary features and functions to make that work. We can just deploy it on a workload cluster and monitor at least a good part of the workload. If we want to go into detail, we clearly need to make changes, but for a good part of application monitoring, it gives us good insights."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
"No issues with stability."
"It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started."
"Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes."
"VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers significant features such as real-time statistics, the ability to identify possible issues within the VM environment, and helpful heat maps."
 

Cons

"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"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 solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
"I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified as Priority 2 or 1 cases."
"The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved."
"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."
"They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us."
"Its billing model is consumption-based. I understand the consumption-based model, but it is not necessarily easy to estimate and guess how many points or how much we are going to consume on a specific application up until we get to that point. So, for us, it would be helpful to have more insights or predictability into what we can expect from a cost perspective if we are starting to use specific features. This can potentially also drive our consumption a bit more."
 

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."
"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 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."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"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 licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."
"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
"I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
40%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The cost of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is fair and reasonable compared to what we receive in support and packages from VMware.
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified as Priority 2 or 1 cases.
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
Our primary use case for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is to enhance application monitoring tasks, allowing us to set up alerts for different components and send them via SMTP to a team d...
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

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
1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
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