Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Zenoss Cloud comparison

Cisco and Zenoss are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #42 with an average rating of 8.0, while Zenoss is ranked #76. Cisco holds a 0.7% mindshare in NMS, compared to Zenoss’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zenoss users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

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1,490 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Zenoss Cloud

Read 8 Zenoss Cloud reviews

1,401 Views
757 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Zenoss Cloud

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 15, 2025

Zenoss Cloud and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance compete in network management and connectivity. Zenoss Cloud has a favorable edge in pricing and support, while Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance holds the upper hand in robust feature offerings required for comprehensive connectivity assurance.

Features: Zenoss Cloud offers scalable monitoring capabilities, integration flexibility, and real-time analytics. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance provides robust network security features, proactive troubleshooting, and detailed connectivity insights.

Room for Improvement: Zenoss Cloud could enhance its network security features, refine its proactive troubleshooting capabilities, and provide more detailed connectivity insights. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance might benefit from improving scalability in monitoring capabilities, offering more flexibility in integration, and focusing on real-time analytics.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zenoss Cloud is known for quick setup and minimal integration challenges with responsive customer service. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance has a more involved deployment but offers precise guidance and strong technical support.

Pricing and ROI: Zenoss Cloud offers competitive pricing focused on lower setup costs, delivering a favorable ROI through flexible licensing and cost-effective scaling. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance requires higher initial investments but yields substantial ROI due to its robust features and comprehensive protection, suitable for organizations prioritizing network assurance and security.

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Zenoss Cloud

September 2025

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Helped 869,785 peers since 2012

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

42nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (43rd)

Zenoss Cloud

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

76th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (33rd), Event Monitoring (14th), Server Monitoring (27th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (51st), Container Monitoring (9th), Cloud Monitoring Software (39th), AIOps (26th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zenoss Cloud is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance	0.7%
Zenoss Cloud	0.6%
Other	98.7%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Pifu Lin

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…

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ClaudiaChen

Cloud Architect - Senior Technology Architect at Telstra

Generates close to real-time alerts so users can resolve issues, but needs more integration and public cloud monitoring features

As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server. What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor.

Read full review

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."

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

"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."

"For us, the most valuable feature is something called TWAMP that allows for real-time traffic in a way that is 10 times lighter than things like SolarWinds. It's in the sub-milliseconds of accuracy, and you can divide tasks so that you can literally see things like the tagging for Quality of Service. That had been incorrect with the carrier, but there was no way on this planet you'd be able to tell a carrier that they're wrong. I have dozens of scenarios where we found "No, that's not right," and got it resolved instantly."

"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."

"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..."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"The most valuable feature is the flexible discovery mechanism."

"The custom built integration is one of the most valuable features because you can see all the especially critical items."

"They have also accommodated many state-of-the-art technologies like Docker and ZooKeeper."

"It's easy to use."

"What I like most about Zenoss Service Dynamics is that it monitors the devices and gives close to real-time alerts. For example, in case the device is not available, Zenoss Service Dynamics generates an alert so my team can resolve the issue."

"Its Docker Container concept is mind blowing. It is the first monitoring tool which comes with Docker features."

"The product offers good documentation that helps with initial training."

Cons

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"The AI aspect needs to improve."

"There is room for improvement with the administrative part. They introduced Control Center to manage things in Zenoss 5. The services that Zenoss provides remained the same, but the administrative part, since they introduced Docker, etc., has become a little complex"

"As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server. What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor."

"The inclusion of a feature to show a graphical view of the network would be a helpful improvement."

"It would be ideal if the product offered sound alerts."

"Now it is stable, but they should design threshold parameters in percentage instead of raw values."

"There was a problem with Zenoss and storage monitoring."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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 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."

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"There are additional costs you'll have to pay apart from the license fee for Zenoss Service Dynamics. I can't remember exactly how much my company is paying because I don't handle the finance part, but the cost is paid annually. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I'm rating the solution three out of five."

"The pricing depends on the environment, the number of services, and the size of the data center. It can go from $100,000 to a million dollars."

"It depends on the customer, what he wants."

"It is very cost-effective compared to the tools I worked with in the past. The company is gaining a lot with respect to the cost factor. It provides agentless monitoring and in a very cheap way."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

36%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Performing Arts

Manufacturing Company

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	4
Large Enterprise	5

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?

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 is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

In my experience, I worked with many monitoring software, but the one that gave me the most functionalities of a large-scale company is Zenoss, due to its ability to monitor completely hybrid and a...

See all answers

Comparisons

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 33% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 13% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 10% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 9% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Zabbix vs Zenoss Cloud

Compared 23% of the time

Nagios XI vs Zenoss Cloud

Compared 21% of the time

Nagios Core vs Zenoss Cloud

Compared 10% of the time

SolarWinds AppOptics vs Zenoss Cloud

Compared 8% of the time

SCOM vs Zenoss Cloud

Compared 7% of the time

More Zenoss Cloud Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

October 2025

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Buyer's Guide

Zenoss Cloud

September 2025

Download Zenoss Cloud product report

Also Known As

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

Cloud Monitoring, Zenoss Service Dynamics

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

Zenoss Cloud revolutionizes IT infrastructure monitoring with a service-centric approach, prioritizing the overall health of services and applications. Harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIOps), Zenoss Cloud offers end-to-end visibility across servers, networks, storage, and applications. Real-time monitoring, event correlation, and automated remediation ensure immediate insights and efficient issue resolution. The customizable dashboards empower users to tailor visualizations to their needs, while scalability accommodates diverse infrastructures. Zenoss Cloud guarantees improved application performance, reduced downtime, and enhanced IT efficiency, making it an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes, from small enterprises seeking simplicity to large corporations requiring advanced scalability. Experience unified monitoring and proactive management with Zenoss Cloud, a comprehensive solution that transforms IT infrastructure optimization in today's complex environments.

Zenoss

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

2degrees, Rackspace, State of North Dakota, El Paso Independent School District, NWN Corporation

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Zenoss Cloud

September 2025

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