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Aternity AppInternals [EOL] vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Aternity AppInternals [EOL]
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Cisco Provider Connectivity...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (45th), Network Monitoring Software (43rd)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user408081 - PeerSpot reviewer
We use it to see the experience of users hitting our sites and analyze performance by region, browser, etc.
* Transaction Trace Warehouse (TTW) which records all transactions all the time, and lets us see performance down to the line of code. * Browsermetrix, which is real-user monitoring via JS injection and linked back to TTW via cookie. It allows us to see the experience of every user hitting our sites and analyze performance by region, browser, etc.
Sylvain Germe - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Synthetic transactions, WMI and SNMP query capability."
"Clicks to root cause - fast & easy to diagnose and deep-dive"
"As an Administrator, before we bought this AppInternals, I didn't have visibility on why items were slow or why an application was not running. This gives us the ability to see what's going on. The application is load balancing. We can now see if its own server has issues or just one specific server has issues."
"We just control on the backend of AppInternals what we want to instrument and what we don't want to instrument."
"Browsermetrix, which is real-user monitoring via JS injection and linked back to TTW via cookie. It allows us to see the experience of every user hitting our sites and analyze performance by region, browser, etc."
"I like it that one can match IPs with the application name."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is the integration with their other systems. It's easy to understand and it points out the relevant problems in the enterprise."
"The product is very useful to find problems in middleware for the application servers, especially agent instrumentation and management is user friendly."
"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"I always have the Skylight dashboard on one of my screens... Now you can create your own dashboard, specific to an application, specific to a server, or to something else."
"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."
"The solution’s UI and single pane of glass is good. The new dashboard is modern with its new design. The look of it is not pretty, but it is efficient, which is good. It is user-friendly; you can find what you need on the interface quickly."
"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 response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
 

Cons

"We have put in a request as an enhancement that we would like to search for items. If we're searching for a URL and we want to know was it a get or was it a post."
"The admin dashboard could be easier as it takes a little bit of time to get used to it."
"I would like for it to have automated updates, the way the product updates itself should be all automated, as opposed to what it is now."
"They should find a way for report generation from TTW to run quicker."
"Deployment and agent patch management is not managed centrally, resulting in a large level of effort to update."
"We'd like to be able to find out performance problems on application class and methods."
"The technical support is not very good and should be improved."
"The recording mechanism for synthetic transactions could be improved as well."
"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"This solution is expensive compared to some others."
"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."
"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."
"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."
"If you want a new version, you go to the website. The hardest part is finding the link, where is that .bin file? Sometimes it's pretty hidden in a document... it's hidden in the release notes or in another file somewhere. And it's usually not on the first page either."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing model is expensive compared to its competitors, but the service it gives to your business, and the data quality, means that it's worth it."
"The licensing model for v9 is better where it is an individual license per server, while v10 licenses are per JVM/ .NET and server instance. The latter model appears to be the model that other APM vendors are using."
"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."
"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."
"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 price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."
"We understand there's a significant cost difference, but have yet to investigate fully."
"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."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
40%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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 ...
 

Also Known As

SteelCentral AppInternals, OPNET ACE, AppInternals Xpert
Accedian Skylight, Accedian SkyLIGHT PVX, SkyLIGHT PVX, SecurActive, Performance Vision
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Instruments, Allianz
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: March 2025.
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