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Akamai mPulse vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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

Akamai mPulse
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
57th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Provider Connectivity...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
39th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (44th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance0.9%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other98.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Arivu Arumugam - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Lacking in regard to observation of the entire platform but does dynamic injections from within
There is little that's unique about mPulse but since the solution is part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections from within the product which is a great feature. the UI is quite good. It offers a basic set of features but nothing unique other than that as part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections.
Pifu Lin - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at DYNASAFE TECHNOLOGIES PTE. LTD.
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…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"There's a good relationship between the price and the licences."
"We are a worldwide company and we need to have a solution with good performance which the solution is providing us with; it has helped our company."
"It’s a very good product for performance tracking, I haven’t used many others, so I can’t comment on a competitive level."
"There is little that's unique about mPulse but since the solution is part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections from within the product which is a great feature."
"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."
"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"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."
"We heavily use the "network analysis" section to dissect and analyze flows."
"The pricing of Accedian Skylight is really good; the sensors are low cost, their licensing model lets clients start small and grow as they need without being forced into expensive appliances or subscription models, and that is one of the things that we really like about offering it to our clients because they are not left out getting the right sort of information straightaway."
"My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"Skylight is not used on a daily basis, but when it's used it usually helps to fix a problem pretty fast."
"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."
"It is not that expensive of a solution and produces tremendous value."
"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."
 

Cons

"Scalability to larger volume of data seems to be hit or miss."
"In the next release, I would like to see the possibility of sharing the metric from this solution with other solutions."
"The solution didn't help us much and that's the reason we never used mPulse on a full scale and why we chose to go with Dynatrace."
"They work very well, only thing is they need more time to improve and fix all the issues."
"The end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."
"It needs a more intuitive GUI and more customization options."
"I would like to see some improvements in parts of their synthetic transactions, which includes all the latency, jitter, and throughput."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"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."
"So scalability, at the moment, is pretty bad for us now, because our modus operandi have totally shifted."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"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 pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."
"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."
"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 ...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nordstrom, Gatwick, DirecTV, MSN, SquareSpace, SAP, Lenovo, Hallmark, myspace, Intuit, Kentucky Derby, Toys "R" Us, Netflix, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Lowe's, Nike, REI, Apple, Sears, Verizon, Wendy's, Huawei
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai mPulse vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,915 professionals have used our research since 2012.