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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs SolarWinds Network Device Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 2025

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
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (46th)
SolarWinds Network Device M...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
27th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Sylvain Germe - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Vijay Samant - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitor network utilization and manage bandwidth efficiently with live monitoring and reliable fault management capabilities
I use SolarWinds Network Device Monitor for monitoring network utilization, bandwidth utilization, uptime, and downtime. It also assists in incident management SolarWinds Network Device Monitor provides live monitoring capabilities, which are very useful. Its fault management capabilities are…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 performance of Accedian Skylight is better than other vendors."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"The deployment process is quick."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"You can create an attractive dashboard and create a hierarchy."
"There are vital features of auto-plugin core ports"
"In terms of general network monitoring features, I find SolarWinds Network Device Monitor very flexible and comfortable to use. The software itself is extremely useful when it comes to monitoring how our data moves between different networks and environments."
"The alerting functionality in SolarWinds Network Device Monitor helps us stay informed during off-hours by sending alerts if our main links or devices are impacted, allowing us to quickly address any issues."
"I like the mapping that you could do and the dashboards were very pretty."
"The product is useful for switches and IP phones."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"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."
"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."
"The main disadvantage of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is the licensing cost, which is expensive."
"It should provide user-friendly page"
"Integration with different tools, such as ServiceNow and Excel, can be improved."
"The reporting feature needs improvement because we are unable to configure reports that were included during initial implementation."
"There is no mobile version of this product, and our team should be able to access it using a mobile device."
"The solution should have AI-powered issue-resolving capabilities"
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor lacks the granularity of other monitoring tools like LiveNX."
"It would be beneficial if SolarWinds Network Device Monitor could provide a feature to monitor CRC errors specifically on individual interfaces rather than the entire device. This would help in detecting intermittent issues and packet drops on main links more accurately, especially when there are CRC errors. It's important for us to be aware of these issues to avoid any voice quality problems or interruptions on our MTS links."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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 price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."
"When compared with other solutions SolarWinds is more expensive."
"I rate the product's price as three to three and a half or on a scale of one to ten, where one means low price, and ten means high price."
"Well, we had a perpetual license and the renewal was $20 to $25,000."
"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is not an expensive solution."
"I find the cost of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor reasonable for our company. Though, I'm not aware of the exact licensing cost."
"The enterprise license is good for the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor. However, it is expensive, they should reduce their price."
"The price of the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is good."
"The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
39%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
I rate the product's initial setup process a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a difficult phase and ten is an easy process.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
SolarWinds pricing is on the higher side, and in India, every customer is cautious about commercial aspects.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor should include automatic diagrams in its network solutions. Additionally, there is a challenge with having to add an additional polling engine after 10,000 element...
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
Network Device Monitor
 

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
Air Rarotonga
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.