Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

Cisco and Splunk are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Cisco is ranked #43 with an average rating of 8.0, while Splunk is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.4. Cisco holds a 0.7% mindshare in APM, compared to Splunk’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

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1,107 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Splunk Observability Cloud

Read 75 Splunk Observability Cloud reviews

7,605 Views
4,183 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Splunk Observability Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

Splunk Observability Cloud and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance compete in the monitoring and observability category. Splunk appears to have the upper hand due to its strong cloud integrations and adaptable dashboards, while Cisco excels in network-focused monitoring.

Features: Splunk Observability Cloud provides real-time data analysis, custom dashboards, and seamless cloud platform integration. It supports extensive monitoring and robust alerting capabilities. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers detailed network performance insights, bandwidth monitoring, and application performance analysis.

Room for Improvement: Splunk users highlight the solution's high cost and complex configurations. Improved third-party tool integration, enhanced user interface design, and automated processes are desired. Cisco could benefit from expanded protocol support and improved data query speeds. Both solutions would gain from simplified, automated features for better usability and integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk Observability Cloud offers flexible deployment options, including public, private, hybrid, and on-premises environments, and is supported by responsive customer service. Cisco, primarily adopted in on-premises and hybrid setups, enjoys a historically familiar support framework, albeit with less frequent engagement.

Pricing and ROI: Despite being costly, Splunk Observability Cloud is seen as a valuable tool with high ROI due to its capabilities. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance has favorable pricing for public and private sectors but can challenge those with budget constraints. Both solutions deliver ROI through improved efficiency and visibility, though cost implications vary based on organization needs.

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

December 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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

43rd

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

43rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Splunk Observability Cloud

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

8th

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.2%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud	2.2%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance	0.7%
Other	97.1%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

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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Dhananjay Dileep

Senior Software Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Unified monitoring has improved end-to-end visibility and reduced detection time across apps

When we have too many detectors in place for one particular app, such as when I have created 50+ detectors through my account, the entire page becomes a bit loaded when creating the 51st detector, feeling heavy and taking time to load. Additionally, it throws random errors; for example, when we try to save one detector, it might throw some random error which is not even related, with something else being wrong, not that particular error, but the underlying root cause might be different. Sometimes the error is just "some problem occurred," and we are not able to point out what the real cause is. This mainly happens when we have too many detectors or too many alerts in place rather than a standard number. One more thing is in the alert rules; if we have a main general alert, and instead of creating a new detector, we are adding a new rule under one detector, when the number of rules also increases, such as when we have 10 or 15 rules under one generic detector, that again creates the same kind of problem, taking some time to save that particular newly added rule, and it might not save at times, just keeps on spinning. Those are the two drawbacks which I spotted recently; other than that, everything looks perfect.

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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

"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."

"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..."

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

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

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

"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 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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"Customer service and technical support respond very quickly."

"Splunk Observability Cloud has proven to be beneficial for our organization, helping improve operational performance and company resilience while reducing the costs of unplanned digital downtime."

"I manage six tools, but Splunk Observability Cloud is one of my favorites, and I aspire to build my career specializing in it because it has great features, more attention in the market, and is a relatively new tool with promising growth."

"The alerts are the most valuable feature."

"Detectors are a powerful feature."

"The feature I find most valuable, is the data integration."

"The most valuable features include user time tracking and the ability to analyze application load times."

"It's beneficial for monitoring performance and infrastructure, especially when deploying applications with multiple versions with Git."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."

"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."

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts."

"The monitoring of workloads when using SignalFx could be improved."

"The UI enhancements could be a way to improve the solution in the future."

"This solution is difficult to configure and the instructions are complex."

"The security could be better."

"Splunk Observability Cloud has not yet completely improved our operational performance for our company's resilience as we are just starting out, however, it will help us ultimately to reduce incident time."

"There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience."

"We currently lack log analysis capabilities in Splunk APM."

More Splunk Observability Cloud cons

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."

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

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

"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 provides value and the cost is not huge."

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."

"The solution's pricing is competitive. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. The price of the solution could be cheaper."

"Splunk APM is expensive."

"I am not in that circle, but we are currently licensing based on our queries. That is working out for us. Previously, it was by volume of data, and now, we can store as much data as we want."

"The solution's pricing is costly."

"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is an expensive solution."

"I would rate the price of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring as an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"Splunk Observability Cloud is expensive."

More Splunk Observability Cloud pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

25%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

No data available

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
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	47

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

What do you like most about SignalFx?

The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SignalFx?

Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SignalFx?

The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...

See all answers

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Compared 3% of the time

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Compared 2% of the time

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Compared 2% of the time

Honeycomb Enterprise vs Splunk Observability Cloud

Compared 2% of the time

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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

Splunk Observability Cloud

January 2026

Download Splunk Observability Cloud product report

Also Known As

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

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring

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

Splunk Observability Cloud offers sophisticated log searching, data integration, and customizable dashboards. With rapid deployment and ease of use, this cloud service enhances monitoring capabilities across IT infrastructures for comprehensive end-to-end visibility.

Focused on enhancing performance management and security, Splunk Observability Cloud supports environments through its data visualization and analysis tools. Users appreciate its robust application performance monitoring and troubleshooting insights. However, improvements in integrations, interface customization, scalability, and automation are needed. Users find value in its capabilities for infrastructure and network monitoring, as well as log analytics, albeit cost considerations and better documentation are desired. Enhancements in real-time monitoring and network protection are also noted as areas for development.

What are the key features?

Log Searching: Efficiently search and analyze logs from various sources.
Data Integration: Seamlessly integrate with multiple environments.
Dashboard Customization: Tailor dashboards to specific monitoring needs.
Monitoring Capabilities: Provides comprehensive insights into application performance.
Security Features: Analyze and address security threats across systems.
Visualization Tools: Enhance data analysis and system performance optimization.

Why consider this for ROI?

Comprehensive Visibility: Gain complete insights into IT infrastructure.
Performance Optimization: Improve overall system performance and efficiency.
Rapid Deployment: Quick setup to meet organization demands swiftly.
Enhanced Security: Strengthen security measures through detailed analytics.

In industries, Splunk Observability Cloud is implemented for security management by analyzing logs from detection systems, offering real-time alerts and troubleshooting for cloud-native applications. It is leveraged for machine data analysis, improving infrastructure visibility and supporting network and application performance management efforts.

Splunk

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

Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

December 2025

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