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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs DX Performance Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

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 Network Monitoring Software
42nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (46th)
DX Performance Management
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
57th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure Capacity Planning (2nd), DX NetOps (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.8%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DX Performance Management is 0.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Pifu Lin - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Sandip Kheni - PeerSpot reviewer
The vertical database loads faster than any other product available
We experience disconnections between the solutions own components. In the last five years, there have been many intermittent connection issues with the four components and we still don't know the reasons. The solution has issues when loading groups that have been created in the application interfaces. It would be nice to have a mobile application. In the current industry and technical word, the mobile phone is the only thing that is always in your hands. Other Broadcom products have mobile applications but the solution doesn't offer one. It would be great to view device parameters and view or download graphs from a mobile device.

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."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"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 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."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"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."
"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..."
"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."
"It gave us one location, one place to do all of group administration, and to build dashboards, and device administration, inventory counts... it really reduced our overall administrative overhead."
"You can create intelligent alerts so you have enough time to replace the router or interface before it's full. The same is applicable for CBQoS channels.​"
"Scalability is the reason we bought the product to begin with. It was designed from the ground up for carrier-grade services, and we are in effect a MSP ourselves. So we were really interested in looking at something to be able to handle the multi-tenancy and scale as large as possible. This was the only solution that we really considered at that level."
"Great dashboards and good integration with other solutions."
"The integration with NetFlow, the NFA solution, so that we can have our flow forensics paired with the SNMP polling performance metrics on the same page."
"One of the most valuable features is the ease of use."
"The tool helps us understand network performance."
"One feature I like about CA Performance Management is the certification of the devices."
 

Cons

"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"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."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"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."
"It seems like we escalate more than I would like to. If anything, they should look at how the tier support goes in place."
"Install is done as root, which is a security no-no, and the database IO requirements were not stated correctly, which lead to a year of instability."
"CA PM can be complex to build and configure. Creating the folders / groups / sites required establishing many rule sets."
"When it goes through discovery, or whatever it is doing in the back-end that slows it down, sometimes we get some failures with it. ​"
"I have mixed feeling about the scalability. I feel like there are things which are being put into UIM right now that are not being included in Performance Center that we need to see in Performance Center. We are kind of being driven to buy UIM, and I can't justify it.​"
"Even though we can see when something is not available, it would also be it would be nice if some sort of alerting took place to that you could know immediately if something went down."
"Spectrum's topology view sometimes does not rebuild automatically when a device is shut down and reconnected. It requires manual discovery and rebuilding of the topology, which I hope can be improved."
"This solution is not very scalable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"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."
"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."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"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."
"We purchase a license to use the solution every three years and we have multiple contracts. They have been increasing the price annually. We have a baseline for three years and then we need to pay the difference from the baseline, and we are in the process of negotiating a new price for all the licenses we need. The price overall is affordable."
"We were looking at other vendors in the marketplace for NetFlow, and CA just beat everybody else in price, cost, and the size to implement. ​"
"I like the licensing model because it's device-based."
"Do your homework and know how many devices you will be managing out of the gate. Be sure to project what your growth will be each year."
"They should provide more scalable licensing for the product."
"The tool's pricing is based on the number of network devices."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
37%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
8%
 

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 do you like most about DX Performance Management?
The tool helps us understand network performance.
What needs improvement with DX Performance Management?
Spectrum's topology view sometimes does not rebuild automatically when a device is shut down and reconnected. It requires manual discovery and rebuilding of the topology, which I hope can be improved.
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

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
Jack Henry & Assoc, Target, CenturyLink, Bell Canada, BrightHouse Networks, Telus, Unisys, Verizon, Southern California Edison, GEICO, Fidelity Investments, Wells Fargo, American Family Insurance Group, Deutsche Telekom AG 
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. DX Performance Management and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
862,077 professionals have used our research since 2012.