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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
43rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (42nd)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 5.2%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana5.2%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance0.5%
Other94.3%
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…
Julian-Lewis - PeerSpot reviewer
Has provided real-time views and integrated insights across diverse data sources
The most valuable feature is Grafana's ability to plug in data or events and monitoring data from any kind of source. The graphing capability is what I use the most. I have made use of Grafana's customizable dashboards and templating features. These features have enhanced my data visualization and analytical processes by enabling me to give real-time views to our end-users of what they're doing or what their service is doing. The historical and trend data allow people to pull up data from Grafana and from whatever source to display it and examine how an environment is being used. I have employed real-time metric visualization capabilities for monitoring and real-time views. These dashboards can also be used as historical views, pulling out more data. The effectiveness of Grafana in delivering real-time notifications through its alerting system is quite good. The widgets are able to highlight errors if they happen in real-time on the dashboard. The alerting functionality is improving. I generally tend to use the monitoring tool for alerting rather than Grafana, but I have had to use Grafana occasionally without any issues.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"Grafana saves us hours compared to DataDog."
"The best thing about Grafana is the visualization. The colors and the ease of use make it very user-friendly."
"Grafana integrates with some of the tools we've chosen beforehand, and while I'm not the right person to elaborate on this since I'm more focused on managing big teams, the teams working with it seem happy."
"The solution has good features."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
"I find Grafana beneficial due to its numerous plugins."
"It is easy to change and move virtual servers."
 

Cons

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"The product's configuration for saving files could be improved."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
"It would be helpful if Grafana provided more information and training on how to use Prometheus."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"The service dashboard is very hard and needs improvement."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"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."
"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."
"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
"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."
"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."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"The solution is expensive."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"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
36%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise24
 

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?
Grafana could be improved through enhancement of graphs and visualizations and providing more integrations. Grafana is going to start working with OpenTelemetry, which would be helpful to have the ...
 

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: September 2025.
869,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.