Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Reviews

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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

June 2025

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How are customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

We had already invested in network & application performance monitoring a few years ago, but our team felt that it was critical to enlarge the scope of analysis of our existing solution, get better retention times and adapt our tooling to a datacenter which is now mostly virtualized. It was also important for our team to rely on a solution which would be able to cope with the volume of data of our datacenter and offer a much more intuitive access to troubleshooting data.

With the experience we already had, the objectives were clear:

• Be able to troubleshoot reactively (with relevant data on past degradations)
• Analyze usage and performance trends through time
• Get an instant overview of the status of the critical applications
• Provide other teams (systems, application) with relevant data to optimize performance
• Help migration and changes with clear network usage information to facilitate the configuration of network devices (firewalls and filtering in the datacenter)

This need became urgent and we decided to take a new look at the market and realized that we could get a much better service than the one rendered by our Visual Performance Manager tools, at a much more favorable rate. We went into a test phase to look at different products in parallel and Performance Vision cumulated many advantages compared to its competitors.

The decision has been easy to recommend to our management as, on top of all these advantages, Performance Vision could do much more for much less budget. The TCO of the migration remained way under the cost of maintenance of our former solution.

We use Performance Vision on a daily basis. We have a monitoring screen which displays the performance status of our critical applications and network links. With the simple color code, we know immediately if an application gets degraded.

Performance Vision is our primary tool for troubleshooting; there are many cases in which it gave us a clear diagnostic, which we would not have achieved without such a tool. We fixed many configuration issues on the name resolution service: as an example, one server was requesting the same DNS resolution 40 thousand times an hour to access its database server; we had the DNS cache configuration fixed and improved its performance dramatically.

We also use Performance Vision to help our team make better decisions, based on actual facts; as an example, we had a certificate issue with Google Chrome. This was not an issue at the time we launched a service, given the small market share of this browser. With Performance Vision, we have been able to show our development team that it became an issue given the share of this user agent among our actual users.

After a few months of use, our feeling is strongly positive. I would recommend Performance Vision to any IT manager in charge of a critical architecture. It improves our efficiency, helps deliver better service every day and guides us to the right decision. Furthermore the Post Installation Follow-up Service, we get from SecurActive’s partner, iBO Solutions, is excellent, and brings the adequate support to extend the use of Performance Vision; we can confirm that the training and certification of their integrators is rigorously done and translates into good service. We also appreciated receiving a new major version (with no extra cost) with great new features no more than 3 months after the integration of the solution. Performance Vision’s HTTP performance module has a very strong value and this confirms that we made the right choice by switching to Performance Vision and that we shall benefit from the continuous improvement of their solution.

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What was our ROI?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

How has it helped my organization?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and technical support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

Valuable Features

Improvements to My Organization

Room for Improvement

Use of Solution

Deployment Issues

Stability Issues

Scalability Issues

Customer Service and Technical Support

Initial Setup

Implementation Team

ROI

Other Solutions Considered

Other Advice

Despite their ability to monitor availability and resource consumption (CPU, RAM, Disk…), our SNMP monitoring tools (Microsoft SCOM) did not provide any useful information to deal with user complaints. “Wireshark”, which we used to use for firefighting operations, could not provide us with an easy way to understand the origin of an issue. 

First, we felt the need to monitor proactively our IT usage, as well as the performance of both our network and applications. In case of complaint, we wanted to be able to quickly qualify:

• Which application was impacted? Which users were impacted? When?
• Was our WAN network overloaded? By which applications?
• Was there any abnormal behavior on our network (virus or worm)?

Second, due to the limited WAN capacities with a maximum of 10Mbps per connection, we needed to fully understand our network usage: which application was using which capacity and when? The objectives were to be able to anticipate congestions and their nasty consequences on our users and to get the right information to optimize our network and its usage.

Our IT infrastructure partner, AB Network, presented Performance Vision from SecurActive, which seemed to respond to our requirements. To validate its capabilities in a real life environment, we organized a proof of concept with AB Network. The conclusion was fully positive!

Each collaborator of the IT team has a full access to the solution. Each of us looks at the information he needs to execute his tasks: two developers, two people in charge of the infrastructure administration, one person in charge of the relationship between industrial engineering and IT, and myself:

• Our developers use Performance Vision to troubleshoot performance issues on our http applications which are critical for our users located across all our sites to access to our databases. A good example is our planning software: this application is accessed from several sites by users from different companies within the group. It connects to several ERPs to consolidate planning information for several countries. Performance Vision helped optimize its performance by providing a clear understanding of how the application chain works.
• The administrators in charge of the infrastructure monitor specifically the WAN usage and the bandwidth consumption. A recent example was the identification of a malfunction inside our antivirus architecture: in principle our antivirus system is composed of servers located on each of our four main sites. A configuration issue made that some clients communicated with the antivirus server of a different site and overloaded the WAN network.
• My team access to the data from the three probes distributed on our main sites through a single graphical interface, which is particularly intuitive.
• There are many examples of diagnostics run thanks to Performance Vision: without this tools, these incidents would have had strong consequences on our business. With Performance Vision, our administrators have been able to quickly pinpoint the origin of the issue and to solve it:
• Citrix Performance degradation: some time ago, we received a growing number of complaints from users based on Poland trying to connect to our central applications. We could quickly identify that the performance was degraded for the Citrix flow only and not for the applications themselves. We identified that the slowdown of the Citrix flows was due to the configuration of our PDM/PLM application, which was using too much bandwidth during office hours.
• We have a file synchronization software which runs over multiple sites. Our sites have different bandwidth available depending on the number of users present on each site. Thanks to Performance Vision’s reporting, we tuned the configuration of this software to manage this synchronization on all our sites, without any harm to our daily business operations.

Our team is currently working on a degradation that appeared on a customized application which relies on VB6 to query our SQL databases. I have no doubt that we will find the necessary elements to solve this problem in a very short timeframe.

On my end, I read a daily report to validate that our response times (application, network, and bandwidth) are fine. Automated, these reports represent no additionally workload for my team and allow us to share an objective history of our network & application performances and usage.

After 15 months of use, our feeling is strongly positive. I recommend Performance Vision to other IT directors on a regularly basis, to have a good visibility on the network and to diagnose or optimize the performance of their IT. It is a key element to help our teams to efficiently collaborate both at the development and infrastructure levels.

Beyond the savings gained on the IT team’s productivity, the reduction of the performance degradations for the business users, the monitoring of our bandwidths and the optimization of our applications, Performance Vision also helped saving the money we would otherwise have spent in the upgrade of our WAN network.

Our team is in charge of the network routing and quality of access of the different applications. As part of our mission, we need to visualize the flows towards our datacenter and to monitor the response times of all applications for each of the 300 remote sites.

In 2011, we started to look for a tool capable of addressing our needs. We selected a few products and tested them intensively on our datacenter: some proved to be good at protocol analysis but way too complex to manage for our needs; they would have required more dedicated resources than we could afford. All reports had to be created from zero and were not available “out of the box” (reporting was indeed an important feature for the Police Headquarters). Other solutions only covered a portion of our needs, because they were based on active QoS /compression devices and were not rendering the necessary diagnostic and analysis capabilities.

In the end we selected Performance Vision based on its strengths which fit well with our needs: In no more than a half day, we were getting relevant information and could use the product; The drill down access to information was fully intuitive; The tool was adapted to all our team (including punctual / light users); The network context (geographical and IP addressing plans) was perfectly translated into the interface and reports.

Moreover, Performance Vision offered an easy way to automate the distribution of graphical response time reports to all our IT staff located on each remote site; the information provided was easily understood by them and required little additional information from our team.

For diagnostics, Performance Vision outperforms our previous sniffer solutions and Netflow collectors!  We started by making an assessment of all applications to understand their respective behavior: we pointed out a certain number of conception defects, which had a negative impact on users despite good server and network performance. We also built a baseline and determined the normal behavior of each application. We also implemented a daily reporting on our most critical applications to check that their performance andbehavior remained in line with the baseline.

Secondly, we proceeded to a large "house cleaning" operation: we got rid of large volumes of DNS errors, corrected the configuration of many workstations (which were using bad URLs or IP addresses for updates), as well as the one of certain servers relying on IP addresses instead of domain names, etc…

Performance Vision is an easy-to-use product; its administration requires very little time. Of course, Performance Vision provides data which has to be interpreted (e.g. one of our critical applications has very good response time per transaction but it involves a large number of transactions per user). The training is a key element in the project: as far as we are concerned, it got delivered in our context, on our own data. It has been very efficient and has quickly put us in a position where we can efficiently understand the information we are getting.

Overall, our experience has been brilliant: we consider Performance Vision as a very good product which fits our initial wishes. It is simple to use, provides a lot of relevant information. Upfront, it is very easy to use for network administrators and provides well designed reports for other IT staff members. We keep on enriching its configuration and using it on a daily basis. We have the project to extend its coverage through an additional virtual probe to analyze network traffic on remote sites (to analyze the application flows which cannot be viewed from our datacenter and diagnose local issues on remote sites)”. 

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How would you rate customer service and support?

How was the initial setup?

What was our ROI?

What other advice do I have?