Accedian Skylight Valuable Features

Sylvain Germe - PeerSpot reviewer
Application and Network Performance Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

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.

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GS
CTO at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

I like the reports that are very standardized and so repeatable, which is amazing. I've got CSOs who, in a prior life, would be doing application support for institutions that are 10 times larger than ours, and they were unaware of what is possible. It's one of those solutions which completely educates really smart technical people as to what is possible. It's extraordinary.

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MW
President at AIP US, LLC

The user interface is very good, because it's all GUI-based. It's not command line. I know a lot of people don't like to type commands, so it's all GUI-based. For the active monitoring, we can put up a very nice dashboard. For example, for circuit performance, if you have 10 locations, then you have a dashboard for those 10 locations connecting to the headquarters. The dashboard will tell you the latency, jitter, and throughput. You can log in and see those number very quickly. If there's a problem, you will see it on the dashboard. On the diagram, you will see where the peak is or where the burst is. It will also tell you at what time. You can set it up to see the last minute, five minutes, hour, day, week, or year. You can set the interval you want.

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Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
March 2024
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MO
Network Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 501-1,000 employees

One of the first things I'll do is look into bandwidth. With the bandwidth, I usually already have an idea if there is an issue or not. And I'll have a look into the errors of course. 

If it's something related to HTTP or VoIP, then I can have a quick look into the protocols, a process which gives me some good ideas too. 

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

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DF
Director at PlexNet Pty Ltd

We use the whole suite. The Skylights centres are doing a lot of the regular work. Looking at site-to-site latency between home offices and the office, it is sort of running every 10 seconds getting some analytics. That's giving us a really good understanding of our networks and network speeds from our home offices to a central point. We are sort of testing the performance of the service and our service providers at the same time as looking at connectivity between two or three sites. 

We are using Skylight PVX to do analytics for application performance and troubleshooting.

A lot of the stuff that we have seen from Accedian, especially where they're heading, they are trying to amalgamate a couple of different products from acquisition and different technologies into one centralized GUI. Even though there is a bit of a difference between both GUIs, we find that the widget type based GUI is really easy to use, as it's informative. You can graph overlay as well as do statistics. It is also really handy with the Skylight PVX analytics and their dashboards. They already have some standard dashboards quite useful for giving you a good 1,000-foot overview type of scenario.

Accedian's deep dive tool set is a slightly different GUI, because you are sort of changing the GUI on the deep dive, but it is very detailed and you can drill right into the heart of the whole conversation, having a look at all sorts of metrics, retransmissions, TCP problems, etc.

The analytics are really good because the analytic engine is good, and they are working in the right direction with it. 

They have their security working well. They have a security plugin going into Splunk, which is good.

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AB
Manager IT Production Service at a maritime company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We use it for troubleshooting, e.g., when we are currently in an IT territory migration, we can check if there is a computer or server using the old domain controller to analyze the network traffic. We can find it faster than the computer using the old domain group. It's more efficient to change it for the network migration this way, and Skylight accelerates this.

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.

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reviewer1188207 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a media company with 10,001+ employees

Media and broadcasting place quite high demands on resources and the key to success is knowing exactly what is going on. The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online.

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VN
Business Development Manager at ISTT

I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate.

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JB
Network Administrator at CHR Citadelle de Liège

All the features are valuable. I am a network engineer, so I principally use the network sensor. 

I always have the Skylight dashboard on one of my screens. The dashboard used to be very simple, a fixed dashboard, you couldn't change anything on it. But there has been a lot of improvement in the new version. Now you can create your own dashboard, specific to an application, specific to a server, or to something else.

The UI is very comfortable, it's very useful. It's very simple to use. It's very simple to explain to someone who doesn't know what a network is.

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BJ
Freelance IT Consultant at SPW (Service Public de Wallonie)

The application modules are quite interesting. I mainly use a CTP module, but I also use a SQL module as well to note the queries sent to the database. We are going to use another module for Active Directory.

What is also very interesting is capturing traffic. The solution generates a PCAP and after we can view the PCAP in Wireshark. 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 UI is quite straightforward. We can easily identify the menu we need to get specific statistics. It's okay. We are not yet using the dashboarding, which is a recently added feature.

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BP
Senior Tachnical Lead at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

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. For example, when my company needs help with installation, Accedian helps out.

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BP
Senior Tachnical Lead at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees

The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors.

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it_user192357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The Performance feature is the one I use the most because it permits me to quickly identify the source of performance slowdowns.

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it_user184044 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer with 501-1,000 employees

I like this product because it is easy to use and it allows us to have a realistic vision of what is going on at the heart of our network. Flow matrices, the ability to analyze response times for our web apps (http), and what is related to SQL requests are among the key features we need.

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it_user201624 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We heavily use the "network analysis" section to dissect and analyze flows. When analyzing past incidents, we also use analysis of application performance. The analysis of the DNS queries is also very useful for us. In sum, we very much value the ability to program the PCAP captures according to the personalized criteria.

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it_user186786 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Information Technology at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Load monitoring and network analysis are valuable features.

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it_user192582 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Systems and Networking with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable feature has been the use of bandwidth.

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AM
Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Ease of use; can literally diagnose an issue in about four clicks.

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AM
Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
  • The speed with which we analyse application performance issues
  • Application analysis modules
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it_user195477 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT with 501-1,000 employees

Network control when experiencing problems indicating "the network is slow".

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Buyer's Guide
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.