Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs OP5 Monitor comparison

Cisco and ITRS are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #40 with an average rating of 8.0, while ITRS is ranked #70. Cisco holds a 0.9% mindshare in NMS, compared to ITRS’s 0.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of ITRS users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

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1,083 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

OP5 Monitor

Read 6 OP5 Monitor reviews

1,078 Views
852 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

OP5 Monitor

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance and OP5 Monitor compete in the network monitoring and management space. OP5 Monitor appears superior due to its extensive features, despite Cisco being favored for pricing and support.

Features: Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers in-depth network connectivity monitoring, ensuring quick fault detection and resolution with its reliability tools. It excels in providing quick resolution to connectivity issues. OP5 Monitor provides comprehensive network visualization and efficient problem detection, with strengths in customizable dashboards and alerting capabilities. It also excels in broad network monitoring capabilities beyond connectivity assurance.

Room for Improvement: Cisco could enhance its feature-set to include broader monitoring capabilities. It can also improve initial deployment complexity and advance dashboard customization options. OP5 Monitor can benefit from enhanced pricing flexibility and more detailed support documentation. It can also refine its initial setup costs to be more competitive and improve scalability options for smaller networks.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco's deployment model benefits from robust customer service, offering extensive documentation and training resources, although initial setup can be complex. OP5 Monitor provides a more straightforward deployment process, which combined with responsive customer service, ensures minimal downtime. Its simpler deployment process is a standout feature in this category.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is generally praised for its competitive pricing and cost-effectiveness, delivering reliable return on investment despite potentially higher setup costs. OP5 Monitor, though possibly more expensive initially, offers better cost-efficiency over time due to its scaling capabilities and feature-rich platform, suggesting a greater long-term ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. OP5 Monitor Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. OP5 Monitor

April 2025

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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

40th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (45th)

OP5 Monitor

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

70th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (53rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OP5 Monitor is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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.

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Harish Venkateshappa

Information Technology Staff at GlobalFoundries

Useful online resources, customizable, and highly effective monitoring

The solution is useful for tweaking. However, there have been some negative experiences, such as limited report capabilities. The only report available is in PDF format, making it difficult for teams managing multiple servers to extract data in Excel format. The speaker recommends that the team improve the report capabilities to better serve users. If there are corrupt files the data can be extracted from them. Anyone who wants to see the performance of memory usage, such as whether it's at 80 to 90 percent, can use this tool. However, other tools can provide this information in two minutes, this tool is more time-consuming and the report it provides is not very effective for practical use. When it comes to reports, the tool falls short. During a recent call, it was noted that while the company has distributed servers across the globe, only the master server can accommodate the reports and events, causing delays. If other servers experience issues, the team cannot view the reporting or tag things, such as for troubleshooting purposes. If this aspect was improved it would be an excellent tool.

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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."

"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"OP5 Monitor is a great choice due to its being built on an open-source monitoring tool and provides ample opportunity for customization based on specific support requirements. It is also user-friendly and easy to manage with a wide range of plugins available for use. In comparison to other enterprise tools, such as Micro Focus, OP5 Monitor stands out for its features and cost-effectiveness, making it the best tool in the market. Customization is one of the key strengths of the tool and provides a lot of capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to find support and plugins for the tool through online resources."

"The best feature is that it is very relatable, stable, and scalable. The logger is a part of the software, but it's not the most important point of it."

"The API makes it pretty easy to integrate with any system."

"It monitors and continuously tests everything that is of importance to you and your users. It could be everything from monitoring disk space to CPU usage to memory. It could include determining if the response time in your e-commerce platform is quick enough, or whether you have too many bounces from some of the pages on your website. You want to monitor anything that could cost you money or time or resources. You can do that with this system. It's very flexible."

"With limited hardware or a virtual machine, you can address a huge network, hundreds of thousands of elements that need to be monitored. Other commercial software is not on that level."

"We can also observe whatever we want, and there are no limitations."

Cons

"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."

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."

"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"IT environments today are in constant flux. This is driven by the newer cloud technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker, etc. The whole Nagios-based monitoring system that OP5 is created on top of, is based on a host-service model. There is a need for a strategy on what to do with more dynamic environments. There is some cool stuff going on in that direction."

"OP5 lacks some visualization, a feature that makes some other products nice. Op5 is built for purpose, which is fine, but if you compare it with some new products, the visualization is not so appealing, especially for management... If you don't need fancy visualizations, OP5 is fine."

"The user interface is not what we are used to these days, and should be improved."

"The solution is useful for tweaking. However, there have been some negative experiences, such as limited report capabilities. The only report available is in PDF format, making it difficult for teams managing multiple servers to extract data in Excel format. The speaker recommends that the team improve the report capabilities to better serve users."

"We do not get performance reports properly."

"They need to improve the dashboard interface."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"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."

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

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"OP5 has a very low price as a solution, compared to many other solutions out there."

"It was not expensive. And because it's less demanding in terms of hardware, you don't have to pay for another SQL or other database license, and you can have a huge installation on one machine..."

"The cost of the license and support are separate. If you want platinum call support, it will cost more than a regular call. I did not opt for it, as it is an additional cost."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

39%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Aerospace/Defense Firm

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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 ...

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What advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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Comparisons

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 43% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 15% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 11% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 9% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Zabbix vs OP5 Monitor

Compared 27% of the time

Nagios Core vs OP5 Monitor

Compared 21% of the time

Opsview vs OP5 Monitor

Compared 20% of the time

PRTG Network Monitor vs OP5 Monitor

Compared 8% of the time

Checkmk vs OP5 Monitor

Compared 8% of the time

More OP5 Monitor Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

May 2025

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Buyer's Guide

OP5 Monitor

April 2025

Download OP5 Monitor product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

Overview

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers real-time application and network performance monitoring, VPN management, and network diagnostics across multiple sites.

Organizations use Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance for active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and troubleshooting performance issues. Deployed both on-premise and in the cloud, it supports IT infrastructure, security, and analytics with end-to-end performance measurement across cloud data centers. The modern, intuitive interface features TWAMP for real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reports, along with insightful dashboards for circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput monitoring.

What are the most important features?

TWAMP: Provides real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reporting.
Insightful Dashboards: Monitor circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput.
Security Integration: Compatible with tools like Splunk for enhanced security.
Application Support: Facilitates comprehensive network performance analysis.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Quick Corrective Actions: Immediate response capabilities for performance issues.
Easy Navigation: User-friendly layouts simplify monitoring and troubleshooting.
Comprehensive Analytics: Advanced tools for in-depth network performance insights.
Cloud and On-Premise Options: Flexible deployment to meet different needs.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance ensures robust performance monitoring and quick diagnostics for VPNs and internet lines. It aids in maintaining the integrity and security of data transference, facilitating active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and performance troubleshooting across geographically dispersed locations, ensuring seamless operation and compliance with industry standards.

Cisco

OP5 Monitor - The Complete Monitoring Solution

OP5 Monitor is a flexible and highly scalable monitoring solution for all sizes of environments. Use just one product to monitor your IT environment regardless of location, whether on-premise, in dynamic environments, public cloud or a hybrid of these.

Digital transformation adds extra layers and complexity to the IT estate by creating a hybrid IT environment of both static and dynamic environments, that can be difficult to monitor efficiently. ITRS OP5 Monitor gives enterprises full visibility over their entire IT estate through a single pane of glass, allowing them to consolidate monitoring tools and cut down costs.

ITRS

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

Svenska Spel, Carus, VGL, Tele2, Viking Line, Clas Ohlson, Vanderlande, Försäkringskassan

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. OP5 Monitor

April 2025

Free Report: Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. OP5 Monitor

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