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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is 1.1%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.6%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.6%
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE1.1%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance0.7%
Other94.6%
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…
ES
General Manager at MOCOMSYS
Offers detailed network monitoring but requires improvement in deployment complexity and pricing
The price is really high, making it difficult for many financial companies to purchase immediately; it will take time for them to afford any budget for the purchase. The traffic data correlation feature's effectiveness with performance issues for clients remains uncertain as there are questions that need to be addressed through engineers regarding how many customers are actually using it. Regarding pricing and value for money, while the solution has the potential to save time and money for clients in the long term, monitoring solutions for performance management or network monitoring do not cause immediate damage to a company. It could lead to damage over time, but financial and management teams typically cannot see the immediate crisis. This is why many big companies Samsung and Hyundai try to build their own monitoring solutions using open-source tools and their own engineers, though it has not been successful.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Ease of use; can literally diagnose an issue in about four clicks."
"I like this product because it is easy to use and it allows us to have a realistic vision of what is going on at the heart of our network."
"Performance Vision saves time diagnosing performance problems and anticipates where investment is needed by pointing to the infrastructure limitations."
"The performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors."
"Customer Service: Very good. Technical Support: Excellent and responsive."
"It has clearly saved us money."
"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..."
"It has played an integral part in providing valuable information in a critical arena."
"The solution gives us increased visibility while conducting an IT deployment, recording data all the time so we have the before picture and the after picture, and in areas where we have instrumentation, we have seen a measurable decrease in mean time to know and mean time to repair."
"With the Vprobes, we quickly identified issues on the application servers, which we normally couldn't, where it usually would be a full circle round between our NOC and server people."
"From my user community, I am getting the impression that something which used to take days has now gone to hours for troubleshooting."
"This solution provides us with increased visibility while conducting IT deployments, for example, if we have devices which have overloaded or links which have saturated, then this tool tells us exactly what is going on with that link or device, and very few tools do it at this level for things like DDoS."
"We are using nGeniusONE to run our bandwidth capacity management reports. In the past, we used to be very reactive, we used to depend a lot on suppliers to tell us which sites are our hot sites, meaning, which have high bandwidth utilization. Now we do this in a much more proactive way and we are moving to a more predictive approach in that aspect, thanks to nGeniusONE."
"With NETSCOUT, it's very easy to check where the problem is located, and you can uncover if it is in the network or the application or the server."
"We have seen ROI, saved a lot of time in triaging, found root cause identities on packet captures, and been able to feed that information back to vendors so they can fix problems with solid evidence, resulting in a measurable decrease in mean time to know (MTTK)."
"One of my clients is a bank; SolarWinds is primarily used in banking to limit network downtime to less than one or two minutes, with all the ATMs connected so the bank can respond quickly when the network is down."
"If you are almost in the dark, SolarWinds can give you a quick view of what you have and you can start basic monitoring."
"The alerting and reporting capabilities of the tool are impressive"
"In my experience with SolarWinds NPM Quality of Experience dashboard, it fulfilled all of our requirements."
"It is considerably cheaper compared to other tools and available technologies in terms of LMS or EMS."
"We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"This is a valuable and powerful product that will provide users with more than they expect, all in one place."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"For the PVX, they are in the process of getting the results to export to cloud and SaaS for analytics. Right now, for the most part, I create that data myself."
"A lower price and more flexible versions will help the product."
"Some of the Skylight applications are a little newer, and they're still moving through initial revs."
"Increase the drive’s capacity to store more data, and maybe switch to a database system similar to 3Big-Data."
"The scalability needs some work. From a probe perspective, we are limited to a certain amount of throughput on the devices themselves. Without having actual hooks into the bare metal hardware for the solutions, it's a bit of a "thumb in the air" as to when we hit our capacity or when our high watermark is."
"They can improve still on the workflows, document their workflows that are commonly used... We don't know some of the workflows yet, and it's not something that you can just read up in the manual. There is some stuff in the help manual and online, but it's to a point where you need to purchase extra training and services from them. You can't just go and read up on it yourself and learn from A to Z..."
"There's a little too much investigation that the user has to do at this point."
"The GUI has gotten better over time but there could be some improvement in how the GUI is built."
"Comparing this to a vendor like Cisco, who provides any component next business day, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE took a long time."
"Another thing that would help out is if they packaged the NetFlow monitor into nGeniusONE. Their NetFlow monitor works with nGeniusONE where you can actually get the netflow of pretty much anything you hook it up to. But it's a separate box that you have to buy. If there was a way that could package that into nGeniusONE, it would be a complete package straight out of the box."
"In previous versions, we used to have an icon on the dashboard when the situation analysis would present an alert. It would be nice if that would be made available on the dashboard again. Something that could be customizable to only illuminate on certain applications."
"While it is good, the single pane of glass view is too high level. It is better for management or someone doing sanity checks. A lot of times, I need to go deeper into the additional screens to get what I want out of it."
"However, the sales team at SolarWinds is extremely aggressive and I would give it probably a 1/10."
"This product could improve by adding cloud monitoring. I want SolarWinds NPM to do much more integration, and have more involvement in cloud monitoring, like AWS or Google, or Azure."
"SolarWinds is not an all-in-compassing product. We are looking to change away from this solution because of the documentation and the solution doesn't have enough integration in our country."
"Technical support hasn't been the most reliable. Sometimes it takes them a long time to respond or resolve the issues."
"The improvement would be that SolarWinds NPM thoroughly checks its patches before releasing them to the market. Better testing, alpha testing, and then releasing it to the market."
"There have been some versions that have had stability issues, but the current version seems pretty stable."
"The price of the solution can be improved."
"NPM comes with a tool called Network Atlas. Currently, it can only link switches to switches and only if all the corresponding ports are monitored."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."
"The platform is expensive."
"Their pricing is very competitive with other solutions... But what I like about NETSCOUT's licensing is that it's shared across all their platforms. They don't create a new licensing scheme for every one of their products. So for nGeniusONE, you buy a certain license level, and it works on all of their products."
"The license becomes cost prohibitive very quickly."
"Cost is probably the biggest drawback. Compared to some of the newer vendors that have popped up in the space, it's definitely more on the expensive side... [But] it's been able to keep its value, even in the face of the cheaper competition."
"The biggest problem we have with this product is the expense."
"Licensing is flexible, it's not tied to anything else. We can easily switch up the licensing piece... Obviously, NETSCOUT is a little bit in the higher range, but it gives you value for money. You get what you pay for."
"Like any company, we always want better pricing. The pricing is okay, but it's not a cheap solution. When you want to deploy it across an enterprise as large as ours, you go into seven figures. It's not a cheap solution to get out there."
"We have a premium customized contract for the solution."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"It is expensive."
"It is not an expensive product."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"Quite highly priced"
"We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license."
"The solution's pricing is low compared to a lot of other tools in the market."
"I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

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 Business14
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise37
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise85
 

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 ...
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 monit...
Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
I would say if it’s an ISP that will build a scrubbing center, Netscout/Arbor is a good solution. In all other soluti...
What do you like most about NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?
Regarding its high price, I give NETSCOUT nGeniusONE a seven.
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools ar...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalabil...
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
NETSCOUT nGenius, nGeniusONE
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

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
Cerner Corporation
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
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