Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs Datadog comparison

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Datadog and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance are prominent in the IT monitoring and management category. Datadog seems to have the upper hand with its vast integration capabilities and flexible deployment options, essential for managing complex systems across various platforms.

Features: Datadog offers extensive integration capabilities, sharable dashboards, and anomaly detection, simplifying complex system monitoring. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance excels in network performance and reliability monitoring, ideal for on-premises and hybrid environments.

Room for Improvement: Datadog users suggest better historical data handling, dashboard customization, and a clearer pricing model. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance could improve data export capabilities, reduce pricing, and enhance analytics features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog provides deployment flexibility for private, public, and hybrid clouds with generally positive customer service feedback. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance has a focus on on-premises and hybrid setups, with feedback indicating room for improvement in support responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog's modular pricing allows flexibility and scalability, delivering high ROI in terms of time savings and reduced tool dependency. Despite its network focus, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is seen as costly, yet valuable for network management and optimization.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Datadog Report (Updated: March 2025).

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Datadog

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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 Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

45th

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

43rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

188

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.3%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 8.8%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Sylvain Germe

Application and Network Performance Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

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.

Read full review

Kevin Palmer

DevOps/Security Principal at Raken

Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation

Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.

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

"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."

"I think the analytics features are okay. My customer also likes the interface, the GUI, because it's easy to operate."

"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."

"The response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."

"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..."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"The most valuable aspects of the product include the APM and profiler."

"I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."

"The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."

"Across CCM and the rest of Datadog, I like how sharable everything is."

"The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great."

"I have found error reporting and log centralization the most valuable features. Overall, Datadog provides a full package solution."

"Dashboards are the most valuable."

"Datadog's learning platform is second to none."

More Datadog pros

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The UI interface of Accedian Skylight could improve."

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

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

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."

"It lacks consistency in the APIs."

"Logging is not a great experience."

"I found the solution to be stable, I did not experience any bugs or glitches. However, some of the managing team did."

"The monitors can be improved."

"They could enhance the alerting functions by creating a new feature to add direct SMS notifications, on-call rotation scheduling, etc., that could replace the need to have this as an external third-party solution integration."

"This service could be less costly."

"Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is competitive overall, depending on the type of customer."

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The pricing is cheaper than other competing products, which is better for our budgets."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."

"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."

"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."

"The price is better than some competing products."

"Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."

"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."

"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."

"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

40%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 advice do you have for others considering Accedian Skylight?

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Any advice about APM solutions?

There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?

With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...

Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Comparisons

Compared 45% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 16% of the time

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 10% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 8% of the time

Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 12% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

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Also Known As

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

No data available

Overview

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers real-time application and network performance monitoring, VPN management, and network diagnostics across multiple sites.

Organizations use Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance for active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and troubleshooting performance issues. Deployed both on-premise and in the cloud, it supports IT infrastructure, security, and analytics with end-to-end performance measurement across cloud data centers. The modern, intuitive interface features TWAMP for real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reports, along with insightful dashboards for circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput monitoring.

What are the most important features?

TWAMP: Provides real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reporting.
Insightful Dashboards: Monitor circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput.
Security Integration: Compatible with tools like Splunk for enhanced security.
Application Support: Facilitates comprehensive network performance analysis.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Quick Corrective Actions: Immediate response capabilities for performance issues.
Easy Navigation: User-friendly layouts simplify monitoring and troubleshooting.
Comprehensive Analytics: Advanced tools for in-depth network performance insights.
Cloud and On-Premise Options: Flexible deployment to meet different needs.

In industries like finance and healthcare, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance ensures robust performance monitoring and quick diagnostics for VPNs and internet lines. It aids in maintaining the integrity and security of data transference, facilitating active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and performance troubleshooting across geographically dispersed locations, ensuring seamless operation and compliance with industry standards.

Cisco

Datadog is a comprehensive cloud monitoring platform designed to track performance, availability, and log aggregation for cloud resources like AWS, ECS, and Kubernetes. It offers robust tools for creating dashboards, observing user behavior, alerting, telemetry, security monitoring, and synthetic testing.

Datadog supports full observability across cloud providers and environments, enabling troubleshooting, error detection, and performance analysis to maintain system reliability. It offers detailed visualization of servers, integrates seamlessly with cloud providers like AWS, and provides powerful out-of-the-box dashboards and log analytics. Despite its strengths, users often note the need for better integration with other solutions and improved application-level insights. Common challenges include a complex pricing model, setup difficulties, and navigation issues. Users frequently mention the need for clearer documentation, faster loading times, enhanced error traceability, and better log management.

What are the key features of Datadog?

Graphs and Dashboards: Visualizes servers and infrastructure with customizable views.
Metrics: Offers deep insights into system performance and user behavior.
Log Management: Provides powerful analytics for logs and seamless log aggregation.
Unified Tagging: Facilitates organization and retrieval of metrics and logs.
APM and RUM: Enables application performance monitoring and real user monitoring for comprehensive insights.
Synthetic Testing: Allows the simulation of user interactions to test application performance.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

System Reliability: Helps ensure uptime and performance across cloud environments.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Assists in identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and log management tasks.
Flexible Integrations: Adapts to various cloud services and infrastructure setups.
Real-Time Alerts: Provides timely notifications to address problems swiftly.

Datadog is implemented across different industries, from tech companies monitoring cloud applications to finance sectors ensuring transactional systems' performance. E-commerce platforms use Datadog to track and visualize user behavior and system health, while healthcare organizations utilize it for maintaining secure, compliant environments. Every implementation assists teams in customizing monitoring solutions specific to their industry's requirements.

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

Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. Datadog