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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Grafana 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
49th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (40th)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 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 Grafana is 6.3%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

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…
Vikash-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Displays data visually from multiple sources while integrating seamlessly with existing systems
Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards. It integrates with Prometheus to pull data and offers a straightforward setup process. Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data. Grafana's integration capability is straightforward, which facilitates building dashboards as needed.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"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."
"Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
"The installation process is easy. We have deployed it on the cloud. I have around 20 to 30 people using the solution in my company."
"The features I appreciate most are the dashboards and the integrations with multiple data sources."
"Visualisation: It is easy to create beautiful, understanding graphs, snapshots to share the graphs with people who do not have access to Grafana, and templating to create powerful graphs."
"The dashboards are very easy to work with."
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"It provides a graphical representation and it's clear to see what's happening."
"Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch."
 

Cons

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations."
"​The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards.​"
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"Regarding joining between queries, merging between two queries that give the same information could be simple, and there are some ways to do that, but if there was something even easier, it would be great."
"The formatting could be better."
"I would give it a ten if it were much simpler for users who just want to get a simple objective in Grafana and are not experienced with technical configuration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I am using an open-source version"
"We are using the open-source license."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
38%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

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 Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it. That is pretty much great for us.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The whole AI capability would be useful for Grafana in the future, and while I don't think we're mature yet, I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following differ...
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
No data available
 

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
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,585 professionals have used our research since 2012.