Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs DX Unified Infrastructure Management comparison

Cisco and Broadcom are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #40 with an average rating of 8.0, while Broadcom is ranked #75. Cisco holds a 0.9% mindshare in NMS, compared to Broadcom’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

1,670 Views
1,083 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

DX Unified Infrastructure M...

Read 120 DX Unified Infrastructure Management reviews

743 Views
454 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

DX Unified Infrastructure M...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

DX Unified Infrastructure Management and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance are robust tools in networking and infrastructure. DX UIM holds the upper hand due to its scalability, stability, and integration flexibility, while Cisco gains an edge with its strong connectivity features.

Features: DX UIM offers advanced agent-based technology for extensive monitoring, a diverse probe library, and customizable dashboards. It seamlessly integrates various monitoring processes, enhancing management effectiveness. Cisco focuses on connectivity assurance with reliable network performance, seamless integration, and robust diagnostic tools that ensure consistent network operations.

Room for Improvement: DX UIM could enhance customer support, particularly during integration challenges, and address gaps in VMware monitoring. Improved dashboard integration, especially in event correlation, would benefit users. Cisco requires improvements in report generation and flexible integration options for better infrastructure monitoring effectiveness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: DX UIM is adaptable to hybrid and on-premises environments, though customer service has diminished since CA's acquisition. Cisco offers diverse deployment options with responsive customer service, although users find navigating beyond first-line support challenging for both.

Pricing and ROI: DX UIM is a premium solution, delivering strong ROI through features that enhance automation and operational efficiency. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance remains competitively priced yet impactful, although recent price increases have been challenging for users. Its value in maintaining network reliability provides noticeable operational cost savings.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. DX Unified Infrastructure Management Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. DX Unified Infrastructure Management

April 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 Network Monitoring Software

40th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (46th)

DX Unified Infrastructure M...

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

75th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

120

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (24th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (55th), Cloud Monitoring Software (41st), AIOps (21st)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.9%, down from 1.1% 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

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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Arunpandiyan M

Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Easy to set up, simple to use, and offers great technical support

There are quite a few manual processes. We've had issues with pulling reports. Sometimes we have trouble or get errors. The reporting process should be easier. If you have a hub, you should be able to have an unlimited number of servers. For example, if you have 500 servers, and the limit is ten, you have to pull 50 reports. We'd like to just pull one report for all servers. This also increases the time to pull reports. If we have to pull more reports, it takes that much longer than just pulling one. The product can be expensive. Right now, they are updating and consolidating the dashboard. I'm expecting an update that will resolve a few glitches in the server.

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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

"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."

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

"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"It is easy to implement but requires good planning."

"It gives us visibility inside applications. It helps us to dig down and find the root cause of any issue within the network."

"Latest version of tool comes integrated with Jaspersoft reporting solution, giving excellent reports."

"It delivers our customers many metrics, so they may make decisions"

"You can integrate clouds, hybrid infrastructure, and on-premise infrastructure into one product."

"MultiWAN and Balance service"

"Scalability and flexibility. The product can grow with your infrastructure so you don't have to install other products. Just add components. It's very simple."

"The feature that we've found to be very helpful is the way the solution categorizes the devices to identify groups, groups of devices and clusters. This allows us to be aware of their position within the topology."

More DX Unified Infrastructure Management pros

Cons

"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."

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

"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."

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

"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."

"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

"I'd also like to see more probes. More probes in the sense that we were coming across devices that we're expected to monitor and manage for which, out of the box, there isn't a nice, clean solution. There are probes that are dedicated for certain devices and certain device types, which is great. But then there are times we come across nuanced products that we have to develop our own solution for. There are probes that exist in there that allow us to make a customized solution, but it takes a lot more time."

"Better support and more accessible resources are crucial. Customers have expressed that support is not as flexible, and it is difficult to obtain necessary information quickly."

"We've had issues with pulling reports."

"A useful feature to have would be automatic configuration per standard by new robots that check in for any particular customer."

"How we can get more native information from CA's solutions."

"Currently lacks a mobile application which would be helpful."

"The company has not kept pace with developments."

"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."

More DX Unified Infrastructure Management cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

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

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"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."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"Reasonable setup cost and licensing prices."

"CAD $400,000 annually."

"The license cost depends on the number of probes and robots."

"The product-price ratio is better than other brands such as Fortinet or SonicWall."

"This product is expensive compared to other vendors (SolarWinds, ManageEngine)."

"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

39%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

13%

Real Estate/Law Firm

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.

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 ...

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What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

See all answers

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...

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 43% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 15% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 11% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 10% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Datadog vs DX Unified Infrastructure Management

Compared 24% of the time

Zabbix vs DX Unified Infrastructure Management

Compared 20% of the time

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs DX Unified Infrastructure Management

Compared 16% of the time

Dynatrace vs DX Unified Infrastructure Management

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs DX Unified Infrastructure Management

Compared 13% of the time

More DX Unified Infrastructure Management Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

May 2025

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Buyer's Guide

DX Unified Infrastructure Management

May 2025

DX Unified Infrastructure Management report

Download DX Unified Infrastructure Management product report

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

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers real-time application and network performance monitoring, VPN management, and network diagnostics across multiple sites.

Organizations use Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance for active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and troubleshooting performance issues. Deployed both on-premise and in the cloud, it supports IT infrastructure, security, and analytics with end-to-end performance measurement across cloud data centers. The modern, intuitive interface features TWAMP for real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reports, along with insightful dashboards for circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput monitoring.

What are the most important features?

TWAMP: Provides real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reporting.
Insightful Dashboards: Monitor circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput.
Security Integration: Compatible with tools like Splunk for enhanced security.
Application Support: Facilitates comprehensive network performance analysis.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Quick Corrective Actions: Immediate response capabilities for performance issues.
Easy Navigation: User-friendly layouts simplify monitoring and troubleshooting.
Comprehensive Analytics: Advanced tools for in-depth network performance insights.
Cloud and On-Premise Options: Flexible deployment to meet different needs.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance ensures robust performance monitoring and quick diagnostics for VPNs and internet lines. It aids in maintaining the integrity and security of data transference, facilitating active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and performance troubleshooting across geographically dispersed locations, ensuring seamless operation and compliance with industry standards.

Cisco

DX Unified Infrastructure Management is the only solution that provides an open architecture, full-stack observability and zero-touch configuration for monitoring traditional data center, public cloud, and hybrid infrastructure environments.

Designed to ensure an optimal end-user experience, this solution provides a modern HTML5 operations console that makes it easy and fast for today’s IT teams to implement, use, and scale – leading to faster time to value.

Broadcom

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. DX Unified Infrastructure Management

April 2025

Free Report: Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. DX Unified Infrastructure Management

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