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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Kentik comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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
47th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (41st)
Kentik
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
12th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kentik is 1.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Kentik1.7%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance0.7%
Other97.6%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Pifu Lin - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at DYNASAFE TECHNOLOGIES PTE. LTD.
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…
Gcecilio - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a media company with 51-200 employees
Traffic insights have reduced transit costs and support secure, direct connections with providers
The best features that Kentik offers are the ability to identify traffic end-to-end and to know which transit is used, if it goes through any other transit, to see the entire flow, from the subscriber to the content provider and vice versa, from the content provider to the subscriber.I can also determine whether it is symmetric or asymmetric traffic, and if it goes through any provider that has some kind of bottleneck. That is very important. Regarding the security part, which is also possible to handle through Kentik, you can configure it in a way that makes the network more secure and reduces the amount of dirty traffic or attacks received. Kentik has had a high positive impact on my organization. Besides the cost reduction, it has been possible to perform troubleshooting more effectively, and also regarding DDoS-related attacks. In addition to cost reduction, we had a more reliable connection. Since the moment we identified that it was possible to have a direct connection with content providers like CDN77, Cloudflare, and Akamai, we established a direct connection there through a PNI with these content providers, making the network less dependent on an IP transit provider.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Skylight is not used on a daily basis, but when it's used it usually helps to fix a problem pretty fast."
"Ease of use; can literally diagnose an issue in about four clicks."
"The response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"APM analysis is much faster than traditional root cause analysis of application problems."
"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."
"Performance Vision saves time diagnosing performance problems and anticipates where investment is needed by pointing to the infrastructure limitations."
"We have found this to be a very valuable toolset, and has paid for itself several times over."
"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."
"Monitoring operational efficiency is easy."
"Kentik excels in telemetry within data centers and works well in multi-vendor environments."
"Overall, I would give Kentik nine out of ten stars."
"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."
"Overall, the ease of use and the fact that it meets client expectations are major positives."
"The most valuable features have been anything around traffic engineering: being able to determine the source or destination of a surge of traffic, whether it's DDoS-related, or a customer just happened to have a sudden uptick in traffic. Being able to tell where that's coming from or where it's going to enables us to do things based on that."
"I am able to do a lot of work on the visualization end to create different visualizations and different ways to get information out of it."
"Kentik has positively impacted my organization significantly, as it serves as our main monitoring system."
 

Cons

"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."
"Combination with Avaya switches pose some problems."
"Support for more VoIP systems, Avaya, etc."
"Increase the drive’s capacity to store more data, and maybe switch to a database system similar to 3Big-Data."
"So scalability, at the moment, is pretty bad for us now, because our modus operandi have totally shifted."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"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."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"It also detects anomalies proactively, but the same is not so true when it comes to real network problems, since they tend to just happen."
"My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing shows that the prices are quite high."
"The product could strive for more improvements to become closer to perfect."
"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"We had faced some issues during an outage and were not able to get the desired results from Kentik tools. It took time to resolve these issues, which is why I give them eight points."
"Kentik can be improved by enhancing the alerting system, especially the way templates work and the hierarchy of these alerts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 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."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"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."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"We have an annual contract with Kentik that we renew each year for a set number of licenses. We also have some burstable licenses which we can spin up and spin down, and those are paid as they are used."
"The tool is cheaply priced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Media Company
9%
 

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 Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
 

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 experience regarding pricing and costs for Kentik?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been limited because I was not responsible for that in my company, but I have spoken with my boss, and he reported that the licensing mode...
What needs improvement with Kentik?
I do not currently use Kentik's anomaly detection. I had communication with Kentik's technical support through a WhatsApp group. When I faced any issues or there were problems with my Kentik collec...
What is your primary use case for Kentik?
I'm using Kentik for my own internal use. My primary use case is to monitor our equipment and to get a more detailed view of where our inbound and outbound traffic is going.
 

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
Pandora, Yelp, Neustar, Box, University of Washington, Zoom, Tata, and Cogent. 
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Kentik and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.