Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

Cisco and Splunk are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Cisco is ranked #43 with an average rating of 8.0, while Splunk is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.4. Cisco holds a 0.7% mindshare in APM, compared to Splunk’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

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1,107 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Splunk Observability Cloud

Read 74 Splunk Observability Cloud reviews

7,605 Views
4,183 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Splunk Observability Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Splunk Observability Cloud and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance compete in the monitoring and observability category. Splunk appears to have the upper hand due to its strong cloud integrations and adaptable dashboards, while Cisco excels in network-focused monitoring.

Features: Splunk Observability Cloud provides real-time data analysis, custom dashboards, and seamless cloud platform integration. It supports extensive monitoring and robust alerting capabilities. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers detailed network performance insights, bandwidth monitoring, and application performance analysis.

Room for Improvement: Splunk users highlight the solution's high cost and complex configurations. Improved third-party tool integration, enhanced user interface design, and automated processes are desired. Cisco could benefit from expanded protocol support and improved data query speeds. Both solutions would gain from simplified, automated features for better usability and integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk Observability Cloud offers flexible deployment options, including public, private, hybrid, and on-premises environments, and is supported by responsive customer service. Cisco, primarily adopted in on-premises and hybrid setups, enjoys a historically familiar support framework, albeit with less frequent engagement.

Pricing and ROI: Despite being costly, Splunk Observability Cloud is seen as a valuable tool with high ROI due to its capabilities. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance has favorable pricing for public and private sectors but can challenge those with budget constraints. Both solutions deliver ROI through improved efficiency and visibility, though cost implications vary based on organization needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Splunk Observability Cloud Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

December 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

43rd

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

43rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Splunk Observability Cloud

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

8th

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.2%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud	2.2%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance	0.7%
Other	97.1%

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.

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Dhananjay Dileep

Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Unified monitoring has improved end-to-end visibility and reduced detection time across apps

When we have too many detectors in place for one particular app, such as when I have created 50+ detectors through my account, the entire page becomes a bit loaded when creating the 51st detector, feeling heavy and taking time to load. Additionally, it throws random errors; for example, when we try to save one detector, it might throw some random error which is not even related, with something else being wrong, not that particular error, but the underlying root cause might be different. Sometimes the error is just "some problem occurred," and we are not able to point out what the real cause is. This mainly happens when we have too many detectors or too many alerts in place rather than a standard number. One more thing is in the alert rules; if we have a main general alert, and instead of creating a new detector, we are adding a new rule under one detector, when the number of rules also increases, such as when we have 10 or 15 rules under one generic detector, that again creates the same kind of problem, taking some time to save that particular newly added rule, and it might not save at times, just keeps on spinning. Those are the two drawbacks which I spotted recently; other than that, everything looks perfect.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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

"Splunk's GUI and dashboard capacity are the most valuable features of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring."

"Overall, I would recommend Splunk to anyone seeking a monitoring solution, thanks to its extensive capabilities and features."

"The dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are amazing, and if you configure them correctly, they are amazing, and it is quite fast as well."

"The most valuable features are troubleshooting and optimizing application performance."

"The most valuable features include user time tracking and the ability to analyze application load times."

"The maintenance of Splunk Observability Cloud is very easy; it's manageable."

"Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) has one great advantage in that if they have SAP users, they can monitor their SAP applications."

"It has been beneficial for our IT infrastructure."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pros

Cons

"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."

"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 UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"There is room for improvement in customer support due to delays and standard feedback responses."

"Splunk Observability Cloud has not yet completely improved our operational performance for our company's resilience as we are just starting out, however, it will help us ultimately to reduce incident time."

"The solution's stability is an area that has room for improvement. It needs to provide constant stability to its users."

"Splunk could be better integrated with configuration manager solutions so we can automatically resolve issues without human interference."

"I've only experienced downtime, crashes, or performance issues when it isn't configured correctly."

"There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts."

"Primarily, the logs in Splunk APM can be challenging to navigate and comprehend, making it difficult to understand the details within each log. Compared to other tools like LogDNA, which are more intuitive in this aspect, the logs in Splunk APM can require more effort to understand."

"The solution should have more sensors regarding fiber intelligence for security measures."

More Splunk Observability Cloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It provides value and the cost is not huge."

"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 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."

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

"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its competitors."

"The product is a bit expensive considering the competition but the company may negotiate the price."

"It is expensive."

"Splunk has been fairly expensive, but it has been predictable."

"Splunk APM is expensive."

"This is an expensive solution."

"I am not in that circle, but we are currently licensing based on our queries. That is working out for us. Previously, it was by volume of data, and now, we can store as much data as we want."

"Splunk's infrastructure monitoring costs can be high because our billing is based on data volume measured in terabytes, rather than the number of devices being monitored."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

26%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	47

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

What do you like most about SignalFx?

The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SignalFx?

Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SignalFx?

The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 16% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

LiveNX vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 6% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 4% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Sentry vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 3% of the time

Observe vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

Honeycomb Enterprise vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

Cribl vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

Avantra vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

January 2026

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk Observability Cloud

December 2025

Download Splunk Observability Cloud product report

Also Known As

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

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring

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

Splunk Observability Cloud offers sophisticated log searching, data integration, and customizable dashboards. With rapid deployment and ease of use, this cloud service enhances monitoring capabilities across IT infrastructures for comprehensive end-to-end visibility.

Focused on enhancing performance management and security, Splunk Observability Cloud supports environments through its data visualization and analysis tools. Users appreciate its robust application performance monitoring and troubleshooting insights. However, improvements in integrations, interface customization, scalability, and automation are needed. Users find value in its capabilities for infrastructure and network monitoring, as well as log analytics, albeit cost considerations and better documentation are desired. Enhancements in real-time monitoring and network protection are also noted as areas for development.

What are the key features?

Log Searching: Efficiently search and analyze logs from various sources.
Data Integration: Seamlessly integrate with multiple environments.
Dashboard Customization: Tailor dashboards to specific monitoring needs.
Monitoring Capabilities: Provides comprehensive insights into application performance.
Security Features: Analyze and address security threats across systems.
Visualization Tools: Enhance data analysis and system performance optimization.

Why consider this for ROI?

Comprehensive Visibility: Gain complete insights into IT infrastructure.
Performance Optimization: Improve overall system performance and efficiency.
Rapid Deployment: Quick setup to meet organization demands swiftly.
Enhanced Security: Strengthen security measures through detailed analytics.

In industries, Splunk Observability Cloud is implemented for security management by analyzing logs from detection systems, offering real-time alerts and troubleshooting for cloud-native applications. It is leveraged for machine data analysis, improving infrastructure visibility and supporting network and application performance management efforts.

Splunk

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

Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

December 2025

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