Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Datadog comparison

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Datadog and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance compete in the monitoring solutions category. Datadog appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive feature set and integration capabilities, making it a versatile choice for diverse systems.

Features: Datadog offers a hosted environment with features like sharable dashboards, robust monitoring capabilities with over 300 user-configured monitors, and extensive integrations with platforms like AWS and Docker. It also provides excellent visualization of metrics and facilitates root cause analysis. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance focuses on targeted connectivity diagnostics within Cisco ecosystems, delivering detailed performance insights and integration with existing Cisco infrastructure.

Room for Improvement: Datadog users suggest enhancements in dashboard sharing options, better usage reporting, and improving the query language. There are also concerns about pricing complexity and stability in certain regions. Cisco users look for improvements in the UI, optimization for large data sets, and enhanced integration with broader network systems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog supports diverse cloud deployment options, including public, private, and hybrid clouds, and offers commendable customer service, albeit with occasional slow response times. Cisco is typically deployed on-premises or in a hybrid cloud, benefiting users with existing infrastructure, and provides reliable customer service similar to Datadog, with similar feedback on response times.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog's pricing reflects its extensive feature set, though its cost can be unpredictable, requiring careful planning. It offers a good ROI for broad monitoring needs. Cisco is considered cost-effective for targeted use within Cisco setups. The choice depends on an organization’s monitoring requirements and budget.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Datadog Report (Updated: April 2025).

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Datadog

April 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

46th

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

40th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

188

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.3%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 8.7%, down from 11.1% 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

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.

Read full review

Kevin Palmer

DevOps/Security Principal at Raken

Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation

Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.

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

"The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors."

"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

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

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."

"Customizable views as well as the ability to "dive in" when we see someting anomalous has improved the workflow for handling incidents."

"The management of SLOs and their related burn-rate monitors have allowed us to onboard teams to on-call fast."

"The most useful feature is the APM."

"It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it."

"The solution has improved the organization by providing good insights into app performance and offering good dashboards."

"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."

"For us to have visibility into our app stack and the hardware we run has been highly beneficial."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."

"It's a bit slow. When I execute a query, something general with a short timeframe that covers one month, for instance, and I do not specify the IP source or IP destination, it can take ages because it has to query the whole database."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic. Datadog's price is also high."

"Datadog could always lower the price!"

"There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to."

"More granular control over dashboard sharing. Timeboard sharing."

"Once agents are connected to the Datadog portal, we should be able to upgrade them quickly."

"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."

"The solution needs to integrate AI tools."

"The documentation could be improved regarding setting up the agent properly and debugging."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"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 price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."

"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 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'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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."

"Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."

"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."

"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."

"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."

"This solution is budget friendly."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

39%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

29%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

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 advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?

With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...

Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Comparisons

Compared 43% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 15% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 11% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 10% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 11% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

May 2025

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Download Datadog product report

May 2025

Also Known As

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

No data available

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.

Cisco

Datadog is a comprehensive cloud monitoring platform designed to track performance, availability, and log aggregation for cloud resources like AWS, ECS, and Kubernetes. It offers robust tools for creating dashboards, observing user behavior, alerting, telemetry, security monitoring, and synthetic testing.

Datadog supports full observability across cloud providers and environments, enabling troubleshooting, error detection, and performance analysis to maintain system reliability. It offers detailed visualization of servers, integrates seamlessly with cloud providers like AWS, and provides powerful out-of-the-box dashboards and log analytics. Despite its strengths, users often note the need for better integration with other solutions and improved application-level insights. Common challenges include a complex pricing model, setup difficulties, and navigation issues. Users frequently mention the need for clearer documentation, faster loading times, enhanced error traceability, and better log management.

What are the key features of Datadog?

Graphs and Dashboards: Visualizes servers and infrastructure with customizable views.
Metrics: Offers deep insights into system performance and user behavior.
Log Management: Provides powerful analytics for logs and seamless log aggregation.
Unified Tagging: Facilitates organization and retrieval of metrics and logs.
APM and RUM: Enables application performance monitoring and real user monitoring for comprehensive insights.
Synthetic Testing: Allows the simulation of user interactions to test application performance.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

System Reliability: Helps ensure uptime and performance across cloud environments.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Assists in identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and log management tasks.
Flexible Integrations: Adapts to various cloud services and infrastructure setups.
Real-Time Alerts: Provides timely notifications to address problems swiftly.

Datadog is implemented across different industries, from tech companies monitoring cloud applications to finance sectors ensuring transactional systems' performance. E-commerce platforms use Datadog to track and visualize user behavior and system health, while healthcare organizations utilize it for maintaining secure, compliant environments. Every implementation assists teams in customizing monitoring solutions specific to their industry's requirements.

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

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's