Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) comparison

Cisco and IBM are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #44 with an average rating of 8.0, while IBM is ranked #40 with an average rating of 7.5. Cisco holds a 0.7% mindshare in NMS, compared to IBM’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

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100% willing to recommend

IBM SevOne Network Performa...

Read 54 IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) reviews

4,565 Views
2,283 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

IBM SevOne Network Performa...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

IBM SevOne Network Performance Management and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance are key players in the network performance management category. IBM SevOne may have the upper hand due to its emphasis on real-time data and comprehensive visibility.

Features: IBM SevOne NPM excels with agentless monitoring, scalability, and real-time data collection through one-minute polling. Users value its ease of certification, comprehensive infrastructure visibility, and user-friendly alert setups, along with its impressive data retention and granular historical analysis. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers real-time traffic insights using TWAMP, detailed performance analytics for networks and applications, and customizable dashboards. It also provides traffic capturing and Layer 7 analytics essential for thorough performance insights.

Room for Improvement: IBM SevOne NPM could improve upgrade processes and data handling during migrations. Users call for better automation, comprehensive baselining, and an updated UI design. Enhancements in SNMP data handling and device certification are also suggested. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance could benefit from optimizing large data queries, enhancing data export capabilities, and improving Layer 7 transaction analytics. Users express a need for clearer data retention policies and more robust reporting features to meet changing needs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM SevOne NPM supports On-premises and Hybrid Cloud deployments, with users rating service reliability high, between 8-10. Its technical support is competent with some independence for upgrades. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance provides support for On-premises, Hybrid, and Public Cloud environments and earns praise for its responsive technical assistance, though some delays occur based on regional or issue complexities.

Pricing and ROI: IBM SevOne NPM offers a flexible pricing model based on managed objects, providing a pay-as-you-grow plan. While some see it as expensive for small businesses, it delivers significant ROI through operational efficiency and monitoring cost savings. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance, despite recent price hikes, is perceived as competitively priced in sensor deployment, offering a positive ROI with detailed event analysis and preventative monitoring.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

February 2026

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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 Network Monitoring Software

44th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (45th)

IBM SevOne Network Performa...

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

40th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (19th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (40th), Log Management (44th), Cloud Monitoring Software (29th)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.7%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is 1.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)	1.0%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance	0.7%
Other	98.3%

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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reviewer1543041

Network monitoring engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Provides consistent infrastructure monitoring with excellent usability and support

The primary use case of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is network monitoring. It helps to maintain the infrastructure's availability and ensure that alerts are generated when needed The most valuable features of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) are its stability,…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

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

"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 ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."

"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 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."

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros

"It's a great solution for highlighting and discovering useful information regarding our network's elements."

"The network data collection has been very flexible for us. It's been thorough in areas that were lacking. They have a team that I've worked with to add other pieces to it. So if it's missing something out of the box, they work with me to add it. I was able to collect that data. It's not perfect, but it's pretty thorough."

"With this tool it is interesting to show the info to the client and explain where the traffic is."

"We've had great feedback from our customers about SevOne support. They're willing to set up a remote session upon request. You have to go through three tiers of support with most vendors, and they ask a lot of screening questions before they will do a remote session. You need to spend a lot of time before an engineer will host a remote session to look at your problematic system."

"SevOne has rich API capabilities, giving us the flexibility to control what we collect and customize the collection, creation, and manipulation of now metrics as necessary."

"We have benefited mainly from the use of the dashboard interface. It makes the network visually interesting for other people who are not in the network. A lot of people are not network techies who understand streams in the network. Based on location, we have streams coming in and out. They can see visually when there is some problem. They don't need to understand all the network technology behind it to be able to understand if everything is working well or if there is a problem."

"Data Insight reporting tool is the most valuable feature. They came up with it a couple of years ago. The most pleasing factor is the dark theme. You don't have a white background. It has templates that you can create for all kinds of reports that you can hit on the fly. It's much better printing of the reports. If you want to send PDFs to people, the reports are actually decent. Whereas for years, the old architecture of the PDFs was rubbish and even our customers said, "We have to manipulate your PDFs because they all have bad margin breaks. SevOne fixed that a couple of years ago with the new Data Insight. It's fantastic."

"The feature that I have found most valuable is the scale-up and scale-down. The scale-up is an operation where the CPU boosts-up and then the memory will boost-up. That works awesomely."

More IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) pros

Cons

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

"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."

"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."

"This solution is expensive compared to some others."

"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."

"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."

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

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"NMS has several areas for improvement. It should be more user-friendly inside of NMS for some of the functionality in there. It's been getting better the last version or two, but the there have been bugs in there whenever I've gone to new versions."

"You need to plan integrations. That has been the biggest bug with SevOne so far. For the things that SevOne pulls directly, those are easy to understand, modify, and put into the database. For things that need to use the Universal Collector or xStats, you need to plan that stuff well in advance."

"We previously have had discussions on some reporting enhancements. So, we raised a feature request, which was delivered from SevOne."

"When I started using it, I tried adding one of the BroadWorks application servers into SevOne... it created thousands and thousands of objects from that one application server and we immediately ran out of license... It would help, when new objects are discovered, if there were a way to categorize those objects and to pick the part of the object you need..."

"Some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility."

"The method of searching for SIP and the way to create the groups."

"With the administrative management of the appliance, if some object appears from SevOne because something changed in the network or whatever, then as an administrator you will not be aware. If you are using this object in a report, this object will disappear from the report and you will not be aware of it. So, if you have 1,000 reports, you cannot always check these reports everyday to see if objects are missing or information has disappeared. We don't have any information on alerts, saying that something is happening there and maybe we need to take action. If an object was replaced by another one, or if a link was replaced by another one, then the graph needs to be changed because it doesn't exist in the graph anymore. However, we don't have this information."

"I would like to see live maps as an added feature. Also, build modules on AI and EML to provide better data insights that would proactively tell us what we should be looking after."

More IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

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

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

"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."

"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 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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product."

"There are cheaper solutions available."

"It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools."

"The pricing has been fair."

"The tool is not expensive. We were able to negotiate with SevOne on pricing."

"A blocking point is the high upfront cost because it is challenging to get it accepted and the purchase approved."

"For the value that you get from SevOne, it's worth the price. There are a lot of cheaper alternatives on the market, and even free options. But they require more staff, more resources, and engineers with more advanced knowledge of monitoring. That's what makes SevOne worth the price."

"Have a bank of licenses, because it is about the number of objects (RAM, ports, CPU, etc.)."

More IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

23%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

Performing Arts

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
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	45

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 needs improvement with SevOne Network Data Platform?

There is room for improvement in the integration with different vendors and the reporting capabilities. It would be beneficial to have out-of-the-box integration with third-party vendors and improv...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SevOne Network Data Platform?

The primary use case of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) ( /products/ibm-sevone-network-performance-management-npm-reviews ) is network monitoring. It helps to maintain the infrastru...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering SevOne Network Data Platform?

To compete with custom-built tools, IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) should accommodate the desired features and be timely in the delivery of feature updates. I would rate the overal...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Dynatrace vs IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

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Splunk Enterprise Security vs IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

Compared 4% of the time

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability vs IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

Compared 4% of the time

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor vs IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

Compared 4% of the time

Zabbix vs IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

February 2026

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance report

Download Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

January 2026

IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) report

Download IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) product report

Also Known As

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

SevOne

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

The IBM® SevOne Network Performance Management (IBM SevOne NPM) solution helps you spot, address, and prevent network performance issues early with machine learning-powered analytics from a single source. Boost network performance and improve your user application experience by proactively monitoring your multivendor end-to-end network across enterprise, communication, and managed service provider networks.

Transform raw network performance data into intelligent and actionable insights. The IBM SevOne NPM solution goes beyond detection, combining industry-leading expertise and advanced technology to help your IT team plan and optimize your network and act on what matters: improving network performance to provide an exceptional customer experience.

For further information, please visit www.ibm.com/cloud/sevo...

IBM

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

ATOS, Devereux, Spark New Zealand, Access4, Rogers Communication, Lumen (formerly known as CenturyLink)

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

February 2026

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