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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs SCOM 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)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
25th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (5th)
 

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 SCOM is 1.4%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.4%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance0.7%
Other97.9%
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…
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Customer Service: Very good. Technical Support: Excellent and responsive."
"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."
"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."
"Ease of use; can literally diagnose an issue in about four clicks."
"We heavily use the "network analysis" section to dissect and analyze flows."
"The response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"The pricing of Accedian Skylight is really good; the sensors are low cost, their licensing model lets clients start small and grow as they need without being forced into expensive appliances or subscription models, and that is one of the things that we really like about offering it to our clients because they are not left out getting the right sort of information straightaway."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"It discovers the components automatically, which is a fantastic thing."
"It integrates with your Windows environment seamlessly and provides a lot of visibility on your Windows environment."
"It is a user-friendly product that requires almost no maintenance."
"It discovers the components automatically, which is a fantastic thing. The discovery works in an automatic way, and it has a dynamic way of discovering the components, assets, and applications. It doesn't require any manual intervention."
"This product helps companies detect problems before they cause any real problems like downtime."
"I like some of their newer features, such as maintenance schedules, because SCOM records SLA and SLO time."
"SCOM has improved our organization by simplifying the monitoring process."
"We were supporting a bank infrastructure using SCOM, and their application availability improved a lot as we had the real time monitoring of the applications due to which application issues were fixed before the end user comes up and complains."
 

Cons

"So scalability, at the moment, is pretty bad for us now, because our modus operandi have totally shifted."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"A lower price and more flexible versions will help the product."
"Increase the drive’s capacity to store more data, and maybe switch to a database system similar to 3Big-Data."
"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."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"Support for more VoIP systems, Avaya, etc."
"Very expensive now that you are forced to buy entire System Center suite, although comparable to other monitoring solutions that include basic APM."
"It'll help if they can provide real-time or closer to real-time monitoring."
"Because SCOM currently runs on a Citrix session, SCOM sometimes becomes slow or crashes when there is too much going on."
"There are some negative points about this product. Sometimes, the capabilities of the software don't appear, and you can't directly see the results. You have to wait for a long period to refresh the policy to push it to the software or other patches."
"I would like more customized reports. People should have some customization option on the dashboards for whenever they put multiple lists into it. Beyond customizing the content, there should be the ability to customize the colors so that they can engage some priority and mark challenges separately."
"Overall, support is not great but it's not bad."
"The System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) is great at alerting you when something breaks. It's not so great at reporting."
"The console was not stable at the early versions of 2007 product, opening multiple consoles might cause a crash, and the web console might hang when opening multiple sessions as well."
 

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."
"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."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"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."
"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."
"Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"Two customers bought the enterprise agreement with Microsoft and paid for Software Assurance. But few customers don't buy it for Software Assurance. They just buy it and deploy it, and they think that we will be using it for the next five years."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
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 Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

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 SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
What is your primary use case for SCOM?
My usual use case for SCOM is as an administrator role where I create reports and provide system configuration for Linux and installation of the SCOM agent. I handle deploying and upgrading the age...
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

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
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.