Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Reviews

My company has many customers and needs to collect the performance stats of the devices, which is an Accedian Skylight use case. My company works with different Accedian solutions, such as Orchestrator, Sensor Flow, etc., and uses Accedian Skylight for device discovery.

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. For example, when my company needs help with installation, Accedian helps out.

The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement.

I've been working with Accedian Skylight for three years.

Accedian Skylight is a stable product.

Accedian Skylight has a helpful technical support team. Whenever I need support, I receive quick responses. Accedian support is excellent, so I'm rating it nine out of ten.

Positive

My company went with Accedian Skylight because Accedian fixes the products. Accedian also secures and addresses customer needs.

The initial setup for Accedian Skylight was easy. Anybody can install the solution because the excellent documentation makes life easy.

Deploying Accedian Skylight takes a maximum of four hours. The process can take one hour, but if something goes wrong, it could take four hours.

I don't deal with the financial side, so I have no information on Accedian Skylight pricing.

I'm working on the 20.4 or 20.5 version of Accedian Skylight.

My customers use Accedian Skylight on-premises.

In my company, ten people use Accedian Skylight.

My company is an Accedian partner.

I'd recommend Accedian Skylight and other Accedian products to potential customers.

My rating for Accedian Skylight is ten out of ten because it's an excellent product.

We are looking into systems that will provide users with end-to-end application and network performance monitoring in real-time. Media and broadcasting place quite high demands and, consequently, the ability to know exactly what's going on is key to success.

We're still in the research stage. We are looking to test performance management systems on a standalone network, which we will load with real-world traffic. We will conduct these tests this year. It's yet to go live, but testing has been very positive.

Media and broadcasting place quite high demands on resources and the key to success is knowing exactly what is going on. The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online.

This solution is expensive compared to some others.

The stability of this solution is good.

Scalability of this solution seems to be generally good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We enlisted help to assist our in-house team with the implementation.

We have yet to develop a business case, so ROI is not a primary consideration.

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

We're in the process of evaluating and have not chosen a solution yet.

The scale we are dealing with exceeds the capability of most performance management tools, so we're keen on seeing systems that scale to support the millions of people who consume BBC media.

We are a hospital and we have a lot of external consultants and a lot of external programs. When we have a performance problem with a program, generally the response of the consultant is, "Oh, it's your network, your infrastructure, your server." With Skylight it's easy to prove that the problem is not our infrastructure and, in most cases, the problem is the application.

We use it to improve the performance of the database tables as well as for our Citrix solution.

I do a lot of troubleshooting with Skylight, troubleshooting network speed and application performance. It's really good because we have all the metrics, and it's very easy to find a direct route to the problem.

For example, one month ago we had to change a lot of servers in a laboratory. Before the change of the infrastructure, we took a snapshot of the network infrastructure and the performance. After the replacement of the servers, we took the same snapshot, the same picture of the network and the performance. We could see if the network was better and if the server performance was better than the old server. It was easy for us to see if the replacement of the hardware was good or not; or, after the virtualization of a server, if the performance is better or not. Without Skylight it would be difficult to compare because we would not have any measurements.

My work is easier with Skylight. It's easier to troubleshoot. It's easier to get a view of my network's health.

It has also helped to improve the interaction between our network, data center, and application teams. I can generate a report, for example, of database status or health. It makes it easier to discuss with the database administrators, to explain where a problem is. It's much easier to explain issues and to discuss them with the correct guy.

It's very important for us to have it. We save a lot of time when we have a problem. It's very easy to point to the problem and to get to the solution, whether it's a network problem, an application problem, or a server problem. It's very easy with Skylight.

In addition, it has improved productivity for sure. Regarding improvements in downtime, it's difficult to evaluate because we had a lot of other sensors to help us know if a server had a problem or if there was a database problem. If it was a big crash, for example, we had that information before we started using Skylight. If the issue is a degradation of an application or a service, Skylight is very useful because we see it on the main dashboard. We see all the applications. It's a critical application. If we have a green, and after that it's orange and then red, we know we have a problem. It's easy.

All the features are valuable. I am a network engineer, so I principally use the network sensor. 

I always have the Skylight dashboard on one of my screens. The dashboard used to be very simple, a fixed dashboard, you couldn't change anything on it. But there has been a lot of improvement in the new version. Now you can create your own dashboard, specific to an application, specific to a server, or to something else.

The UI is very comfortable, it's very useful. It's very simple to use. It's very simple to explain to someone who doesn't know what a network is.

It's a very stable application. I have never had to reboot the server, other than after an upgrade. And to upgrade it takes about ten minutes.

The product is very scalable.

We have two internal data centers and two external data centers; one for production and one for the development. We have about 200 access switches. We have Citrix farms and about 200 servers with Windows and Linux. We have a mainframe. It's a large environment.

We have had no issues with scaling.

Technical support from the Skylight is very good. When we have a problem with deploying or configuring something, it's very easy to contact technical support and they are very good. In general, within one hour, we have the response to our problem. It's the quickest support I see, and I use technical support from Cisco, from Palo Alto. Skylight support is very fast.

We had to escalate an issue one time. They redirected me to R&D and I had a response in one or two hours, with the correction I needed.

We didn't use anything before Skylight.

The initial setup of Skylight is very easy. It takes about ten minutes. In ten minutes the server is running and it's collecting information. That ten minutes is when you have a physical version. For a VMware version it takes about one hour to deploy it, but it's very easy. 

The initial deployment is easy, but for the rest, day-to-day, there is work: To configure the zones, the critical networks, critical applications, it's day-to-day. The initial setup is easy, but afterward, I worked on it for about an hour every day. The configuration is ongoing.

I deployed it directly.

It has clearly saved us money. For example, when we have a problem with an external application and we meet with the distributor of the application, they will say, "Okay, the problem is the performance of the server." The distributor will suggest we get a new server with more capacity, more disk, more memory, more everything. We can prove, with Skylight, that the problem is not on the server. We can prove that the problem is not on the network. We can prove that the problem is due to the database's structure. When we put the diagram in front of the distributor he says, "Ahh. Okay." And the database administrator can say, "Okay. Just add an index here, an index here," and after that, the product is good to go. So we have saved a lot of money there.

Before we had Skylight's analysis, the people who use the application would spend a lot of time in the application and would lose a lot of time waiting for it. After we proved that the problem is the application, and after fixing the problem, its speed improved a lot.

It's difficult to quantify the money we have saved with it, because it's money for a server, it's money for the time of the people involved with the application, it's money for the time of our networker equipment, etc.

Pricing is a little bit expensive.

I tried SolarWinds before, but it's more expensive.

I used the first version, it was called Secure Active. After that, its name was Performance Vision. And now it's Skylight.

With each new version of Skylight, there are a lot of new features.

I am the principal user of Skylight. When anybody in the service - about 20 people - has a problem, they come to me and I generate the reports. But I'm the only one who uses SkyLIGHT.

We don't have any plans to expand usage as of now.

We use it to troubleshoot application issues. For instance, when an application is slow we can identify where the bottleneck is in the chain.

In terms of network troubleshooting, we had an issue with an application, that it was slow for certain users. We didn't understand why. We started to investigate and, thanks to Skylight, we were able to see that the application was very chatty. It was fetching lines one-by-one. That meant it had to do many transactions to get the full bundle from the host. Skylight helped a lot in this case because we could see that there were 1,000,000 small transactions instead of just a few.

We didn't have a tool before to investigate end-to-end performance issues. Thanks to Skylight we have a tool for this kind of investigation. When business users are complaining about application problems, we are able at least to identify where the bottleneck is. Of course, if the bottleneck is on the server itself, we will use tools other than Skylight because it is more for network investigation than on the server side. With Skylight we can identify that most of the time is spent on the database or on the proxy or on the application server. It has sped up investigations a lot. Before, we had to spend more time to identify in which block the bottleneck was found. Now it's much faster. It has reduced our mean time to respond by at least 50 percent.

In addition, sometimes users complain that they are not getting the data they want. Thanks to Skylight and the PCAP functionality, we are able to capture the traffic and to confirm whether the data was transmitted or not. It's quite important in terms of proof.

Skylight has helped to improve the interaction between our network data center and application teams. The server people are now aware of the possibility of investigating the traffic. Thus, when a technical team is facing an issue, they always think, "Okay, maybe I can get more information thanks to Skylight."

The application modules are quite interesting. I mainly use a CTP module, but I also use a SQL module as well to note the queries sent to the database. We are going to use another module for Active Directory.

What is also very interesting is capturing traffic. The solution generates a PCAP and after we can view the PCAP in Wireshark. 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 UI is quite straightforward. We can easily identify the menu we need to get specific statistics. It's okay. We are not yet using the dashboarding, which is a recently added feature.

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. That is a bit slow. It can take two or three minutes to get the results. It would be helpful if they improved the way the database is optimized. To improve on this, we have purchased an appliance with disk. Up until now, we used mechanical disks. We are going to change our Skylight architecture and use an SSD disk with the appliance. We are tackling this issue with a new architecture.

Another negative point is the fact that we don't know where the retention of data occurs. But the more we go into the past, the less data we get. And it's not crystal clear at what point we are losing data. For example, if I take the data from one week ago, it's less detailed than data from one hour ago. We don't know at which point we are losing the granularity. We need to be aware that if we are looking for data from two days ago, we only have granularity of one hour. If we are looking for data from one hour ago, we have granularity of one minute. This is not indicated in the application. It's not mentioned.

One other issue is that it is not so easy to get the binaries from the website, for updating. Once we know where to find the binaries, updating easy.

Skylight is very stable. I do not remember having an issue with it. It can be slow when we are running big queries on a large timeframe, but if we do small queries it's fast. I don't remember any crashes. It's quite stable.

Scalability is our issue. We are collecting more and more data but we are still on mechanical disks. That's why we have decided to go with a new appliance with a local SSD disk. We expect to have better scalability with the new architecture. This is something to keep in mind with the product: The number of flows, the type of disk, and the amount of data.

Technical support is good but we are going through our partner. They are responsive. They answer quite fast and usually with the right solution.

We are using PRTG and Nimsoft. These are more general monitoring tools, not specialized in network analysis. We are also using a network tool for latency.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was a fast installation. The deployment took less than five days.

We had to identify where to put the probes because we could put them on a physical connection or on virtual connections. We have a network which is quite complex, with more than 200 sites and two data centers. So the first question to answer was where to put the probes. After that was decided it was easy. We put the appliance in the rack and we asked the network team to cable the connection with the router. It was simple.

The setup required one person from the external consultant and we dedicated one network engineer for a couple of days. After installation, maintenance of the solution requires half a day per month; maybe four or five days a year. It's minimal. And when there is an update, deploying it is quite straightforward. It's not a big deal, it takes one hour.

We used an external consultant to install the product. They helped us a lot with the setup for a reasonable price. It was matter of days to get everything working. In addition, they gave us support in terms of training. When we ask questions they're quite responsive.

It may have saved us money but it's difficult to quantify. But if we are able to demonstrate that we can identify where a problem is, that's already something positive. Before, we struggled a lot to say, "Okay, the problem is on the database or the problem is with the application server." But thanks to Skylight, we can say, "Okay, the problem is there," and we can investigate more within that specific block.

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

Maybe they should have a price for public sector organizations. I don't know if they differentiate between public and private sector organizations.

We are a big organization with around 10,000 people and 200 sites. So we are considering other APM solutions that are highly rated in industry reviews. We are considering Dynatrace, but we have not yet purchased that product. We are still with Skylight.

It provides a better view of your infrastructure. You know better when the big flows are going through. It gives us a better picture of where the pain points are. For instance, if there is big traffic between 9 pm and 2 AM, that's due to the backups. It gives a better overview of how the data flows are working.

We have VMware onsite but we are not using an external cloud so we are not using it for performance and traffic monitoring of a cloud environment.

We currently have four people using the tool: me and two people on the network team and one person on the end-user computing team, because sometimes people complain that their PC is slow.

People are already aware that it exists within our organization. The next step is to extend it to a few people. There is a notion of the privacy of the data. We can't give the tool to everybody. Otherwise, they will see that Mister X is surfing on this website, etc. It's very important for our organization to have this under control. So maybe there will be two or three more people using it, but not 100 people.

Ease of use; can literally diagnose an issue in about four clicks.

Root cause analysis and speed of application performance analysis is faster.

Support for more VoIP systems, Avaya, etc.

Very easy to deploy.

Product is very stable.

Product scales well.

Good level of technical support from vendor.

Setup was easy to understand and can fit into most network scenarios.

Good value for money paid.

ExtraHop.

• The speed with which we analyse application performance issues
• Application analysis modules

APM analysis is much faster than traditional root cause analysis of application problems.

A lower price and more flexible versions will help the product.

Four years.

The product is relatively straightforward to install, just follow the instructions.

The product is very stable.

The product is very scalable.

The customer service is excellent.

The technical support is above average.

No, this was the first APM product we used.

Initial setup is easy.

We implemented the product in-house.

N/A

The product is a little expensive but does work well.

Yes we evaluated ExtraHop and SolarWinds.

We heavily use the "network analysis" section to dissect and analyze flows. When analyzing past incidents, we also use analysis of application performance. The analysis of the DNS queries is also very useful for us. In sum, we very much value the ability to program the PCAP captures according to the personalized criteria.

When we are approached for our expertise following an incident on an SI that seems to indicate network infrastructure, the application easily allows us to highlight the black points and to generate exculpatory (or inculpatory) reports for the infrastructure, pointing to the real blocking points.

We would like to see support for the sFlow protocol in a future version.

For 2 years.

We have encountered problems with the license that is connected to the hypervisor on which the virtual appliance is deployed. All of a sudden, the VM is not transportable from one hypervisor to another, which worried us and forced us to review our mode of product displacement between different sites.

Nothing in particular.

No concerns in particular. The physical machine hosting the product is sized properly for our needs.

The level of customer service is satisfactory. They make a point every year to follow up with our needs and product usage.

The support is good enough and we received quick and competent assistance during incidents that we raised.

We have not tested similar products over the long term.

The documentation is clear enough to permit a rapid installation and configuration. The video tutorials were appreciated.

The implementation was only done internally.

The most valuable feature has been the use of bandwidth.

When a remote contact complains about a slow application, we can immediately pinpoint the cause of concern.

Embed a warning system to a mailbox when it exceeds the threshold for use of bandwidth over a given period of time.

We have been using the solution for several months.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability..

We encountered no issues with scalability.

Do not know - we never used the customer service.

Excellent technical support.

The installation was done by Securactive and was not complicated.

We implemented through Securactive. Expertise was excellent.

Operator-options (too complex, too expensive).