Amazon CloudWatch vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance comparison

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Download the complete report

Helped 920,939 peers since 2012

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

Amazon CloudWatch

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

24th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (19th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

42nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (46th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 0.9%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon CloudWatch	0.9%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance	1.0%
Other	98.1%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Amandeep Pawar

Engineer Technology at Iris Software Technologies Private Limited

Monitoring microservices has improved and teams respond faster to production incidents

In my opinion, the best features Amazon CloudWatch offers are Metrics, Analytics, Logs, Alarms, Dashboards, and Log Insights, with standout features being real-time monitoring and centralized logging, proactive alerting, and fast troubleshooting. The dashboards in Amazon CloudWatch help with troubleshooting by allowing us to easily look into API latency and how much resource consumption is occurring. The CloudWatch dashboard provides real-time data and views of our application health while Log Insights lets us quickly search and analyze logs to identify root causes of production issues, making troubleshooting time efficient and monitoring much more streamlined. Amazon CloudWatch has positively impacted my organization by improving our ability to monitor production issues and easily find the root cause in the application. We can quickly fix issues at the point of occurrence, and real-time metrics for microservices provide centralized logging and automated alerts that enable fast incident detection, quicker troubleshooting, and better application reliability, ultimately reducing operational efforts by giving engineers a single platform for monitoring AWS resources and microservices. I have seen many positive outcomes in my organization, estimating that CloudWatch reduced troubleshooting time by around thirty to forty percent because engineers could correlate metrics and logging from a single platform. Early alerts also help us resolve many performance issues before they escalate into major incidents, contributing to improved service availability.

Read full review

Pifu Lin

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…

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

"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."

"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."

"The product helps us collect and store various metrics to set test alarms."

"The solution is easy to use."

"It is a robust analytical tool and it goes beyond mere functionality and extends into the realm of providing comprehensive insights."

"You can enable alarms and metrics, and it has robust integration with AWS services. You can also trigger events. For example, if the CPU utilization is above 80%, it can launch a new instance for you."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda."

"Our team finds it overall quite useful."

More Amazon CloudWatch pros

"We have found this to be a very valuable toolset, and has paid for itself several times over."

"Thanks to Skylight we have a tool for this kind of investigation and it has reduced our mean time to respond by at least 50 percent."

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

"APM analysis is much faster than traditional root cause analysis of application problems."

"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 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."

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

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

Cons

"It is hard to configure; it is not a straightforward tool."

"The pricing model can get very expensive as the project's scope grows."

"We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog."

"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."

"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."

"I think the machine learning aspect of it probably does help because machine learning is not really machine learning."

"Amazon CloudWatch has all the data, but to see what is happening, you need some third-party tool."

"There is some delay in logging that they need to improve on."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

"So scalability, at the moment, is pretty bad for us now, because our modus operandi have totally shifted."

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

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

"Combination with Avaya switches pose some problems."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions."

"The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform."

"It’s an open-source solution."

"The tool is not expensive."

"What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us."

"It is a free-of-charge service."

"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."

"The pricing is average."

More Amazon CloudWatch pricing and cost advice

"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."

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

"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."

"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance 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.

See recommendations

920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

14%

Construction Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	26

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

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Amazon CloudWatch has been positive. It was very easy to set up because it is built into AWS and does not require separate licensing, bein...

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?

For improvements, I think Amazon CloudWatch could enhance certain areas, particularly regarding pricing structure. I wish to see simpler pricing, more intuitive dashboards, easier log queries for b...

What is your primary use case for Amazon CloudWatch?

My main use case for Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and analytics of the application servers. I basically use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the microservices and AWS infrastructure, helping me ...

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?

What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Zabbix vs Amazon CloudWatch

Comparisons

Compared 5% of the time

Datadog vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 4% of the time

Sematext Cloud vs Amazon CloudWatch

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon CloudWatch Competitors

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

DX SaaS vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 4% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 3% of the time

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 3% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Product Reports

Amazon CloudWatch

Download Amazon CloudWatch product report

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch offers centralized logging, real-time monitoring, and integration with AWS services, assisting organizations in improving operational efficiency and reducing troubleshooting time.

Amazon CloudWatch provides a comprehensive monitoring solution that includes dashboards, alerts, and detailed reporting to analyze server and application performance. Its user-friendly interface supports AWS services monitoring through integration with resources like EC2, S3, and Lambda. However, improvements can be made in customization, dashboard design, and integration with third-party tools.

What are Amazon CloudWatch's key features?

Ease of Use: Simplifies monitoring and logging with a user-friendly interface.
Centralized Logging: Collects logs from applications and AWS resources for comprehensive analysis.
Real-time Monitoring: Provides real-time insights into AWS services and applications.
Integration with AWS: Seamlessly works with AWS resources such as EC2, S3, and Lambda.
Dashboards and Alerts: Customizable dashboards and proactive alerting to quickly identify issues.

What benefits should users look for?

Operational Efficiency: Reduces troubleshooting time through detailed monitoring and alerting.
Scalability: Adapts to growing infrastructural needs without compromising performance.
Stability: Delivers a reliable and consistent monitoring experience across AWS environments.
Data Analytics: Offers advanced analytics to understand application and infrastructure performance.

Amazon CloudWatch is widely implemented across industries to monitor essential metrics like CPU and memory utilization. Companies rely on its capabilities for anomaly detection, incident response, and performance checks, making it indispensable for automated monitoring in AWS environments.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers a user-friendly interface with real-time monitoring and network analysis, aiding businesses in identifying connection issues and optimizing performance.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is recognized for its real-time monitoring capabilities and straightforward GUI, key in diagnosing network performance issues and managing application performance. Its bandwidth utilization and network analysis features help optimize performance. Users can program captures for comprehensive performance checks, improving application performance analysis and troubleshooting. Though high pricing and licensing challenges are noted, and there’s a demand for improved design and adaptable reporting, it remains a valuable tool for network health insights.

What Are Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance's Most Important Features?

User-Friendly Interface: Easy navigation and straightforward setup.
Real-Time Monitoring: Quickly identifies connection issues.
Bandwidth Utilization: Optimizes network performance.
Latency, Jitter, and Throughput Display: Offers insights into network health.
Programmable Captures: Ensures comprehensive performance checks.

What Benefits and ROI Should Users Look For in Reviews?

Network Performance Diagnosis: Efficiently identifies and resolves issues.
Device Health Monitoring: Keeps a close check on network devices.
Application Performance Management: Ensures optimal functioning across deployments.
Reduced Packet Loss: Enhances overall user experience.
Bandwidth Monitoring: Aids in resource management.

Implementations of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance span industries from data centers to remote offices, supporting on-premise and cloud deployments. Companies leverage it to ensure network efficiency and reduce packet loss, providing vital analytics that enhance user experiences and support business operations.

Cisco

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus

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

Amazon CloudWatch vs. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance