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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs ThousandEyes comparison

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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)
ThousandEyes
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (10th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThousandEyes is 1.6%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ThousandEyes1.6%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance0.8%
Other97.6%
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…
Siddumanisria Mindi - PeerSpot reviewer
Network engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Monitoring has transformed internet visibility and speeds up resolving external service issues
ThousandEyes needs to specify unit consumption forecasting or scaling testing and deeper app analytics. It needs deeper out-of-the-box Layer 7 code or database-level insights. Additionally, it should unify the GUI with broader Cisco platforms and flatten the learning curve, adding better correlation with local laptop system metrics such as endpoint depth, CPU, RAM, or processes. ThousandEyes isn't designed to be a full-blown SNMP monitoring tool for on-premises infrastructure. While it tracks network paths effectively, it doesn't provide deep local device telemetry such as switch port buffer utilization, fan status, or power supply health. For full internal device monitoring, you'll still need to pair it with traditional tools such as SolarWinds or Cisco Catalyst Center.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Network control when experiencing problems indicating "the network is slow"."
"Skylight is not used on a daily basis, but when it's used it usually helps to fix a problem pretty fast."
"When a remote contact complains about a slow application, we can immediately pinpoint the cause of concern."
"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."
"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 is very stable, has reduced downtime and migration time, and with Skylight we never forget anything."
"The return on investment is immediate, delivering a 40% to 60% reduction in MTTR by eliminating multi-team war rooms and saving hundreds of engineering hours annually through instant ISP path proof, directly protecting business productivity and SaaS SLA accountability."
"ThousandEyes is an excellent product that really provides accurate metrics into network performance as well as the user experience, and I would highly recommend it."
"I would advise others looking into using ThousandEyes to consider it one of the best tools for monitoring their network infrastructure."
"It's fairly easy to set up."
"ThousandEyes gives companies better visibility."
"The historical timeline feature is what I appreciate most about ThousandEyes because when people report that something occurs at a specific time of day, I can set up a test and capture the issue in action."
"ThousandEyes has positively impacted my organization by raising the customer experience and positive feedback by over 70% due to the complex situation with local service providers, allowing me to resolve user feedback and issues which enhanced the user experience significantly."
"I think the analysis service that Cisco provides is extremely valuable."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Support for more VoIP systems, Avaya, etc."
"Combination with Avaya switches pose some problems."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"Because of the policies in Vietnam, we cannot connect the system to the Accedian cloud. It would be good if Accedian could provide a local cloud. In the next release, I would like them to focus on improving and adding more reporting features. This will help the operations teams."
"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."
"ThousandEyes can be improved by making the installation procedure less time-consuming and enhancing the interface to be more user-friendly."
"ThousandEyes could be improved by unifying the GUI with the rest of the Cisco products since it remains legacy from its original state when Cisco acquired it."
"Once I fully use the tool 100%, I'm sure I would have something to critique, however, for now, I'm happy with it."
"They only offer synthetic requests."
"They only offer synthetic requests, so they should create an agent for users that can track your request."
"I chose eight out of ten because of the lack of objective performance data."
"Presently, it lacks the ability to integrate with other Cisco products."
"An area where ThousandEyes can be improved is in providing more in-depth packet analysis; we've found instances where ThousandEyes indicates everything is okay, but it's actually not."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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 price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"In our company, we incur a yearly expense in our company for the licensing part. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten since it is expensive."
"The solution costs several thousand dollars per year."
"It is a quite expensive solution."
"The solution is cheap."
"The solution's pricing is cheap; I rate it a five out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
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 Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise22
 

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 the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...
What needs improvement with ThousandEyes?
We face challenges with hybrid and distributed enterprise networks since we use Cisco, but we also have other third party integrations. When it comes to ThousandEyes, it does not show anything when...
What is your primary use case for ThousandEyes?
I have been using ThousandEyes with this company for two years. The main use case is that we would like to get insights into our calls. Currently, we are still in the POC state with ThousandEyes, b...
 

Also Known As

Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
No data available
 

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
Wayfair, GitHub, Craigslist, Comcast, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Box, HP, Zendesk, IO Data Centers, Good Technology, NNTCommunications, Proofpoint, Schneider, Crowdstrike, Avera, Pitney Bowes, InstartLogic, Shutterfly, Shutterstock, Condé Nast, Roche, Jive, Actelion, Brocade, Infor, Okta, JLL, DigitalOcean, Zuora, NetSuite, CloudFlare, One, DemonWare, Quantcast, Carbonite, CareerBuilder, Prosper, Oscar, Slack
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. ThousandEyes and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.