Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Dynatrace comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Dynatrace and Accedian Skylight compete in the application performance management category. Dynatrace has the upper hand due to its advanced AI capabilities.

What features are offered by Dynatrace in comparison to Accedian Skylight?

Dynatrace offers AI-driven performance monitoring, detailed analytics, and automated root cause analysis. Accedian Skylight offers network performance insights, visibility into network health, and real-time monitoring.

What areas of improvement can be found in Dynatrace in comparison to Accedian Skylight?

Dynatrace could improve its integration options, customization capabilities, and user interface complexity. Accedian Skylight needs better documentation, an enhanced user experience, and more comprehensive reporting features.

How is the ease of deployment and customer service of Dynatrace in comparison to Accedian Skylight?

Dynatrace’s deployment is swift and straightforward, with solid customer support, though users sometimes find it complex. Accedian Skylight has smooth deployment but receives mixed feedback on support quality.

What setup costs and ROI can be seen with Dynatrace in comparison to Accedian Skylight?

Dynatrace users acknowledge higher setup costs but feel that the advanced features justify the expense through substantial ROI. Accedian Skylight users find its cost-effective pricing model appealing, but ROI feedback suggests varied experiences.

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

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Dynatrace

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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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

45th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (43rd)

Dynatrace

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

346

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.3%, down from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 10.6%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

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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Anand_Kumar

Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology

Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems

There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"This solution has helped to improve the interaction between our network, datacenter, and application teams. I have used other tools, but this tool can pinpoint the root cause of my application or network issue in the majority of the cases. So, it helps different divisions or groups in the IT department to troubleshoot together and get an issue resolved. This tool helps a lot in our day-to-day networking application and IT operations."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"Dynatrace is an extremely helpful APM solution in large, complex environments, whenever we need to have an integrated vision of our users, infrastructure, and applications."

"The agent deployment is the most valuable. You don't need to do any configuration. You just deploy the agents, and it can automatically detect your infrastructure. That was the greatest feature that we saw in Dynatrace. If there is any database, it can detect it automatically and present everything to you."

"Great for monitoring critical internal and public-facing applications."

"We are able to see globally our end user response time tracing down to the user ID."

"Smartscape is a wonderful feature. I'm really loving it because there's no need for you to go deep into an analysis and go in to see where we are going wrong. You go to Smartscape, pass all the connections, and it will tell you the root cause."

"The visibility that it provides through the application's behavior allows us to find trends based on our customized metrics."

"Their support system is good. I would rate them at 9.5 out of ten."

"By using Dynatrace Managed, we have improved customer satisfaction and have also helped internal teams and subcontractors make the application more stable."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

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

"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"The web-based UI needs to be improved."

"They could also, develop an observability platform where you could have the ability to inject events, locks, and traces."

"They're doing vulnerability assessments of the application stack by using OneAgent. It's a never-ending story if you are trying to be sure your application is also secure."

"We'd like it to be more user-friendly, which, in our case, might be a big ask as we have a fairly complex environment."

"The initial setup was relatively complex because we were trying to implement into environments that they did not yet support."

"It needs container log monitoring."

"Scalability-wise, on the data side, I'm really worried because they are giving only seven days data retention. They should plan something on that, to increase the data."

"We have multiple tenants. If you have them up at the same time, you can't see in the UI which tenant you're in. It doesn't tell you."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"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."

"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."

"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 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 provides value and the cost is not huge."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"We have a three-year contract. We have 30 licenses for the full stack and 3 licenses for the DEM unit."

"Our annual costs were about the same for both AppDynamics and Dynatrace."

"We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good."

"We purchased a subscription for one year and it is an expensive solution for a large enterprise like ours."

"The licensing for Dynatrace is high. If you want to go for monitoring solutions, then why Dynatrace? If you have a particular budget, you can go for many other monitoring tools - apart from Dynatrace - and they can help you more and give more data than Dynatrace can. It's not worth the money that you spend for Dynatrace."

"I have not been able to observe more than 1% overhead, despite Dynatrace saying that it can be slightly higher in some situations."

"This is an expensive solution, but it is also worth the money."

"Dynatrace is bit costly and not easily affordable."

More Dynatrace 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.

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849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

39%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

36%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

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 advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Any advice about APM solutions?

The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...

What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?

While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 4% of the time

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Datadog vs Dynatrace

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

New Relic vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Dynatrace

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

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Also Known As

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

No data available

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

Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.
OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.
PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

What does Dynatrace offer?

Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.
Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.
Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.
Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

Reviews from Real Users

Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

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

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Dynatrace