Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG comparison

Cisco and NETSCOUT are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #43 with an average rating of 8.0, while NETSCOUT is ranked #77. Cisco holds a 0.7% mindshare in NMS, compared to NETSCOUT’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of NETSCOUT users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

2,574 Views
1,596 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Read 13 NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG reviews

957 Views
938 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance and NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG compete in the network infrastructure management space. Cisco has an advantage in pricing and support, while NETSCOUT is preferred for its advanced feature set.

Features: Cisco offers proactive network monitoring and end-to-end assurance, enhancing issue resolution. NETSCOUT provides network traffic analysis, visibility, and packet-level insights, focusing on performance analytics. NETSCOUT’s deep network analysis gives it a competitive edge.

Room for Improvement: Cisco could enhance advanced traffic analysis, scalability, and detailed analytics. NETSCOUT may benefit from simplifying deployment, integration, and user interface complexity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco provides straightforward deployment and strong customer service, ensuring efficient setup and continuous support. NETSCOUT offers comprehensive technical assistance despite complex deployment, helping organizations with their intricate setups.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco delivers competitive initial costs and good ROI with proactive features. NETSCOUT’s higher setup cost is justified by long-term ROI due to its advanced analytics, appealing to those valuing comprehensive information despite initial expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

December 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 881,114 peers since 2012

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

43rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (43rd)

NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

77th

Average Rating

8.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance	0.7%
NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG	0.5%
Other	98.8%

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.

Read full review

Michael Gideon Genita

Associate System Engineer at SMS Global Technologies, Inc.

Easy to set up with good documentation and helpful support

I'm using it for a customer The packet flow switch is the most valuable aspect of the solution. It's an easy product to set up. We can scale the solution if we need to. It's stable. The documentation is well-written and quite useful. It's compatible with other products. Under the pocket flow…

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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..."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"The technical support is really good. They will go above and beyond, if you are running into a problem. You can go to a sales engineer, who will engage technical support to help you out."

"The ability to troubleshoot customers' connectivity has been very beneficial."

"The real-time troubleshooting and application segregation that you can do within it."

"It helps us to assist our customers to isolate problems. If it is us who is having the problem, then we can use it to streamline the process."

"The tool has the ability to look back within a month's data. It is very easy to navigate within the tool and troubleshoot the problem, compared to other solutions that we've used in the past."

"It is very rock solid. We hardly have any hardware issues."

"I love the single pane of glass view. It makes it easier to not have to navigate everywhere. It allows more simplistic visibility, without having to go from tool to tool to tool, or from window to window to window."

"It's an easy product to set up."

More NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG pros

Cons

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"The scalability has some limitations and quirks to it. I would like to be able to upgrade rather than replace the whole thing."

"We don't use the single pane of glass view, even though we own it."

"The single pane of glass feed still needs work."

"Being able to manage the packet flow switches in nGeniusONE would be great."

"There is a timeout feature that we have been asking for awhile."

"I'd like them to make the product more user-friendly."

"It's not able to communicate with our probes."

"The NetFlow Collectors could handle more flows per minute."

More NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG 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."

"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."

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

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

"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."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"The scalability is good, but it comes at a cost. E.g., if you need 100 InfiniStream because you are sending gigs or terabytes of data to one InfiniStream, then you will have to purchase another InfiniStream, which are not cheap."

"The price is a little high."

"This product could be cheaper."

"I would like it to be more scalable with less spend."

"It can be scalable. It just costs too much. With a company as big as ours, it gets too expensive to accommodate every single site."

"To capture more with the solution that we bought, you have to buy another InfiniStreamNG, and there are only four ports in the back."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

25%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Government

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	8

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 ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

See all answers

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

Comparisons

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 15% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 6% of the time

LiveNX vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 6% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 6% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 4% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Riverbed NPM+ vs NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Compared 18% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Compared 15% of the time

Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Compared 15% of the time

Flowmon vs NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Compared 13% of the time

cPacket cClear vs NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Compared 12% of the time

More NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

January 2026

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Buyer's Guide

NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

January 2026

Download NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG product report

Also Known As

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

InfiniStreamNG, NETSCOUT ISNG, Infinistream

Overview

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is known for its user-friendly approach to network analysis and performance monitoring. It excels in real-time diagnostics, helping organizations quickly resolve network issues and optimize performance effortlessly.

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance focuses on comprehensive network troubleshooting and performance monitoring, assisting in identifying bottlenecks and analyzing applications. Real-time data collection and evaluation ensure IT infrastructure efficiency. With active monitoring of latency, jitter, and throughput, users maintain smooth operations across multiple sites and applications. While highly effective, improvements in data handling, protocol support, and dashboard aesthetics are suggested to enhance user experience.

What are the key features of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance?

Flow Matrices: Advanced analysis of network paths and traffic distribution.
SQL and DNS Analysis: In-depth insights into database and domain queries for troubleshooting.
Bandwidth Assessment: Evaluation of network capacity and utilization for performance optimization.
Real-time TWAMP Monitoring: Tracks network performance using Two-Way Active Measurement Protocol.
Application Performance Modules: Monitors the performance of various applications and services.
Customizable Dashboards: Personalized views for tracking critical network metrics and trends.
PCAP Capturing: Detailed packet analysis using tools like Wireshark for deeper insights.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

Ease of Use: Intuitive design allowing users to swiftly diagnose network issues.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Enhanced visibility of network activity for better control.
Performance Efficiency: Optimization of throughput, reducing downtimes and improving service delivery.
Cost-Effectiveness: Balances features and functionality with competitive pricing for better ROI.

In industries such as telecommunications and finance, where network reliability is crucial, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers critical network performance insights. It supports high-demand environments by providing data-driven decisions, ensuring infrastructures handle increased loads efficiently.

Cisco

NETSCOUT’s new ISNG platform harnesses the power of IP intelligence by mining traffic in real-time to deliver accurate and actionable data for service assurance, cybersecurity and business intelligence applications. The InfiniStreamNG platform fully supports the nGeniusONE and Iris application suites.

NETSCOUT

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

U.S. Department of Defense

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

December 2025

Free Report: Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT InfiniStreamNG report.

See our list of best Network Monitoring Software vendors.

We monitor all Network Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.