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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs DX Unified Infrastructure 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
41st
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (47th)
DX Unified Infrastructure M...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
76th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (23rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (54th), Cloud Monitoring Software (40th), AIOps (24th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 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 Unified Infrastructure Management is 0.4%, down from 0.4% 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…
Mark Tukh - PeerSpot reviewer
Great scalability, versatility, infrastructure coverage and ease of implementation
I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. The number of people needed for deployment depends on the customer, but we usually need at least one person and two to three at other times. The initial implementation takes about two months. The full implementation can be infinite because you may want to implement more. The product does not require a lot of maintenance. To increase the implementation, we push additional services in the first and second years to make it more robust and fully implemented. We usually sell to big enterprises. It can also be affordable for smaller enterprises, but we don't work with them a lot. We have from 2,000 to 10,000 workers. So the product itself can have five, ten or even 20 users.

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."
"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."
"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."
"The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors."
"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."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"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."
"DX Unified Infrastructure Management offers visibility into network activities, integration capacity, and enhances monitoring at the core and application levels."
"Monitoring infrastructure and business applications are the most valuable features."
"It is reliable when it comes to monitoring."
"It gives an alarm when there's something going on, not just when there's an expected spike that happens every night on a server."
"Easy admin functionality. You can quickly do all the admin functionality without reducing cycles."
"The number of probes available. Out of the box, I believe about 200 probes are available. And, if there's a probe that is not available, you can write one. You can also go to the communities and suggest, and based on demand, CA will write one for you."
"Latest version of tool comes integrated with Jaspersoft reporting solution, giving excellent reports."
"Another division handed us the opportunity to monitor their solutions as written, and UIM was very useful for that."
 

Cons

"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"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."
"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."
"A useful feature to have would be automatic configuration per standard by new robots that check in for any particular customer."
"There should be wider coverage of storage infrastructure."
"The other element is that there are no real templates, out of the box. Let's go with an example where we do have the probe, which is great, and we do have a really nuanced customer with a small set of devices that maybe not a lot of other customers use. There might not be a template in place, so effectively we have the tool in front of us but we still need to develop a solution. So it would be really nice to see a little bit more of something like a central repository of templates that we could use. That would help us expedite our onboarding process."
"There is also room for improvement in the reporting. It is not really good enough, according to our customers. So what we now usually do is use Power BI to get them the kinds of reports they want."
"I'm very happy with DX Unified Infrastructure Management, but what could be improved is its user interface because currently, it has many wide spaces. All the information you need is in DX Unified Infrastructure Management, and it's a reliable tool, and though that's more important than the gaps in the user interface being smaller or wider, those gaps still need some improvement. I know the team is working on it. My company had some backend problems with DX Unified Infrastructure Management in the past that have now been solved. The setup for the tool also needs improvement because it's complex. Another room for improvement in DX Unified Infrastructure Management is its technical support because it's sometimes not as knowledgeable or responsive. What I'm suggesting to be added to the tool is an open-standard ELK Elastic-based database where you can put in all data, so that you can use the data in other systems as well."
"We would like the navigation of this solution to be more user friendly for our system administrators."
"I would like to see auditability. We've built our own audit functionality to ensure that every CI has the desired model configuration applied to it. And we run that on a daily basis. If that became part of the product, I think it might be a little bit less intensive in terms of resource, because we're doing it with scripts."
"Reporting capability can be improved especially when it comes to availability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"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."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"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."
"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
"CAD $400,000 annually."
"The license cost depends on the number of probes and robots."
"Reasonable setup cost and licensing prices."
"This product is expensive compared to other vendors (SolarWinds, ManageEngine)."
"The product-price ratio is better than other brands such as Fortinet or SonicWall."
"Pricing for DX Unified Infrastructure Management isn't cheap at all. It's a complex tool, so you have to pay more. No one is happy with a large bill to pay, but if it's a complex product and you designed a complex solution to be monitored, it'll be your fault that you need to buy an expensive product, and that would be implicit in the design of DX Unified Infrastructure Management. Monitoring is just a small part of it. Sometimes you have to pay a significant amount of money for a complex yet very good solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
37%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
7%
 

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 is your primary use case for DX Infrastructure Manager?
We are an integrating company that offers DX Unified Infrastructure Management to customers. We help them set it up, do the integration, and provide support. Our end customers include financial ins...
What advice do you have for others considering DX Infrastructure Manager?
I would recommend DX Unified Infrastructure Management to others as it is a good and reliable solution. I would rate it nine out of ten due to its robust functionality and capability to support inf...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Infrastructure Manager?
The pricing of DX Unified Infrastructure Management is high and often a concern for customers. The cost is higher compared to other Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), which is feedback we hav...
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
DX Infrastructure Manager, DX Infrastructure Manager for Z Systems and CA UIM for zSystems, CA UIM (DX Infrastructure Manager), CA Nimsoft Monitor, CA UIM, DX Infrastructure Manager
 

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
CBNCloud, IIJ Global Singapore, AT&S, AXSOS, Aozora Bank, HCL Technologies, IntelliNet, Securex
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. DX Unified Infrastructure Management and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.