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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE comparison

Cisco and NETSCOUT are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #43 with an average rating of 8.0, while NETSCOUT is ranked #29 with an average rating of 8.5. Cisco holds a 0.8% mindshare in NMS, compared to NETSCOUT’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of NETSCOUT users who would recommend it.
Cisco Provider Connectivity...
Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews
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  • 1,525 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Read 50 NETSCOUT nGeniusONE reviews
  • 3,346 Views
  • 2,309 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance are enterprise-level network management solutions. While nGeniusONE is noted for superior data visualization, Cisco leads with comprehensive features, better pricing, and user support, which can justify its investment.

Features: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE offers robust reporting, traffic analysis, and dependency mapping. It provides extensive packet inspection and NetFlow traffic analysis, monitoring real-time communication effectively. Features cover voice traffic analysis, latency detection, and insightful dashboards. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance delivers effective network management but lacks the depth of packet capture and analysis found in nGeniusONE.

Room for Improvement: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE's complex interface and high cost receive criticism. Enhanced GUI could improve user experience and reduce dependence on specialized staff. Modular pricing is suggested to avoid payment for unused features. Cisco could enhance intuitive configurations and workflow integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, deployed on-premises with hybrid options, is known for responsive tech support but requires dedicated staff, affecting ease of deployment. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers on-premises and cloud compatibility with less complex setups and accessible support, earning higher user satisfaction.

Pricing and ROI: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE's pricing is premium, with reliability and capabilities that offset costs, but not all users make full use of its features. Licensing rigidity can lead to accumulating costs, though ROI is achieved through decreased troubleshooting time. Cisco's competitive pricing offers ROI through quick resolutions and improved customer satisfaction, reinforcing its value proposition.

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To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Report (Updated: September 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
September 2025
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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 Network Monitoring Software
43rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (46th)
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
29th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.8%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is 1.5%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE1.5%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance0.8%
Other97.7%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Pifu Lin - PeerSpot reviewer
Addresses connectivity issues with real-time monitoring while offering good local support
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 quality use. This involves addressing network device issues, specifically Cisco network devices One…
Read full review
Ruslan Melnyk - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for network performance monitoring
My manager can explain the use cases attached to the product. I am a unit leader in my company, and I don't sell the product directly to our partners or customers. In my company, I manage certain processes and a team while building, developing, and providing them with a direction for the market. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is a good solution for network performance monitoring since it is not cloud-based. My company sells NETSCOUT nGeniusONE in eight to ten countries. I think the solution is not good for capacity planning, but it is better to help find problems in applications because not every infrastructure is good at managing working applications. I think it is a solution meant for applications. The tool is useful for solving problems attached to applications. The tool's real-time network monitoring capability was used when the product was more reactive. In our company, if we use real-time monitoring, then we need to deal with raw traffic. In our company, if we don't see any problem in the real-time systems, we have the possibility to rely on the tool since it acts like a time machine for us, which can allow us to get back to the areas of problem and solve them. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. For many users, it can be a good monitoring system that can be scaled up in the future. I think it is a good product to start with when working systems in an environment. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is another tool used to manage raw traffic, and I find it to integrate well into our customers' network. I am not using it actively on the system. I use the tool for network packet brokers. I rate the tool a ten out of ten.
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."
"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."
"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 ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."
"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."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros
"Deep packet inspection is a very useful tool as it works in real time and uses serial packet-level analysis."
"Packet decode and bandwidth analysis reports are the two most valuable features."
"The ability of the dashboards is useful for discover, mapping and understanding of application behaviour."
"The valuable features include packet analysis, packet capture, and [that] it's easy to use."
"We've saved a lot of time in triaging. We have found root cause identities on packet captures and have been able to feed that information back to a specific vendor, because a lot of our technology is emerging. So, we're able to give that feedback to our vendors and have them solve the problems that they need to fix, and they have the evidence to do so."
"The support is good."
"The most valuable feature is visibility."
"Among the valuable features, if it's TAP'ed well, are the density of the data that you can get and the relatively high veracity or accuracy rate that we see from it."
More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE 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."
"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 Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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 initial deployment is tedious and requires a lot of build, deployment and configuration time. Experience is key to a successful deployment."
"The dependency mapping is good, but I am hopeful that they will build some type of partnership and relationship with ServiceNow. I want to see NETSCOUT partner with ServiceNow so they can leverage Service Now Discovery and Service Mapping to automate the build of the service dependency mappings inside of nGeniusONE."
"I'd like to see the nGeniusONE, the nGeniusPULSE, and the OptiView, their three separate products, work a little better together, a little more streamlined."
"Maybe the optics cost could be improved. It's not about the product itself, but the optics cost from other companies is very high, which affects the business. When you buy a $1 million product, you shouldn't be expected to pay $500,000 for support. So, support, operation, and professional services are very expensive. It's the main weakness."
"The product is a little complicated."
"The price is really high, making it difficult for many financial companies to purchase immediately; it will take time for them to afford any budget for the purchase."
"The solution could do more for security. It should offer more security-related features."
"It's not intuitive, it's not simple to use. It is probably the only monitoring tool, out of all the ones that I have, that I really need an expert on, an expert from nGenius, a contractor that I have to pay, to manage the tool. And that's because it's simply not easy to use. Netscout needs to focus on making it easier to use."
More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE cons
 

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's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."
"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."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice
"Make sure you get the low down on your licensing and understand the licensing requirements before making a purchase, especially when it comes to an upgrade. Make sure that it suits your needs before you commit to it. For example, we purchased ATA at version 6.2.1. At that time, the licensing covered everything we need. NETSCOUT comes out with 6.2.2, stating that in order to upgrade, you had to purchase CyberStream licensing. Now that requires some additional funding from both a capital investment and a maintenance cost. That's something that should have been said, "Well, if you want these additional features, you will need to purchase these CyberStreams." Otherwise, we should be allowed to continue on the basic operations as it is now through the newer releases without being stuck."
"It can be expensive, but if you have a good configuration, based on what you are looking for, it's okay, it's manageable."
"We have a premium customized contract for the solution."
"This solution has saved us more than $50,000 a month and freed up 30 percent of our bandwidth."
"The product is too expensive compared to other products."
"It is very expensive, but it's well worth the money."
"The scalability becomes very expensive quickly."
"The platform is expensive."
More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE pricing and cost advice
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
36%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise37
 

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.
See all answers
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 ...
See all answers
What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
See all answers
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
I would say if it’s an ISP that will build a scrubbing center, Netscout/Arbor is a good solution. In all other solutions, Imperva is a great choice.
See all answers
What do you like most about NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?
The pricing is a bit high yet not overly expensive. The cost depends on the size of the customer, as sizing controls the pricing.
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 39% of the time
Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 15% of the time
Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 11% of the time
SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 9% of the time
AWS X-Ray vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
AWS X-Ray vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 6% of the time
More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors
Dynatrace vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
Dynatrace vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 10% of the time
Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 10% of the time
ThousandEyes vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
ThousandEyes vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 9% of the time
SolarWinds NPM vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
SolarWinds NPM vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 8% of the time
LiveAction LiveNX vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
LiveAction LiveNX vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 3% of the time
More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
September 2025
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reportDownload Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report
Buyer's Guide
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
August 2025
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE reportDownload NETSCOUT nGeniusONE product report
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
NETSCOUT nGenius, nGeniusONE
 

Overview

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is known for its user-friendly approach to network analysis and performance monitoring. It excels in real-time diagnostics, helping organizations quickly resolve network issues and optimize performance effortlessly.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance focuses on comprehensive network troubleshooting and performance monitoring, assisting in identifying bottlenecks and analyzing applications. Real-time data collection and evaluation ensure IT infrastructure efficiency. With active monitoring of latency, jitter, and throughput, users maintain smooth operations across multiple sites and applications. While highly effective, improvements in data handling, protocol support, and dashboard aesthetics are suggested to enhance user experience.

What are the key features of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance?
  • Flow Matrices: Advanced analysis of network paths and traffic distribution.
  • SQL and DNS Analysis: In-depth insights into database and domain queries for troubleshooting.
  • Bandwidth Assessment: Evaluation of network capacity and utilization for performance optimization.
  • Real-time TWAMP Monitoring: Tracks network performance using Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol.
  • Application Performance Modules: Monitors the performance of various applications and services.
  • Customizable Dashboards: Personalized views for tracking critical network metrics and trends.
  • PCAP Capturing: Detailed packet analysis using tools like Wireshark for deeper insights.
What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?
  • Ease of Use: Intuitive design allowing users to swiftly diagnose network issues.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring: Enhanced visibility of network activity for better control.
  • Performance Efficiency: Optimization of throughput, reducing downtimes and improving service delivery.
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Balances features and functionality with competitive pricing for better ROI.

In industries such as telecommunications and finance, where network reliability is crucial, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers critical network performance insights. It supports high-demand environments by providing data-driven decisions, ensuring infrastructures handle increased loads efficiently.

Cisco
The nGenius Real-Time Monitor software provides you with tools to monitor and display information about your network both historically and in real time. The nGenius Real-Time Monitor software allows you to understand your current network usage and to plan for future needs. It also allows you to proactively troubleshoot problem areas in your network.
NETSCOUT
 

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
Cerner Corporation
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
September 2025
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