Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE comparison

Cisco and NETSCOUT are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #44 with an average rating of 8.0, while NETSCOUT is ranked #28 with an average rating of 8.7. Cisco holds a 0.7% mindshare in NMS, compared to NETSCOUT’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of NETSCOUT users who would recommend it.

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews

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1,688 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

Read 51 NETSCOUT nGeniusONE reviews

4,060 Views
3,004 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Cisco Provider Connectivity...

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 2025

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE and Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance are enterprise-level network management solutions. While nGeniusONE is noted for superior data visualization, Cisco leads with comprehensive features, better pricing, and user support, which can justify its investment.

Features: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE offers robust reporting, traffic analysis, and dependency mapping. It provides extensive packet inspection and NetFlow traffic analysis, monitoring real-time communication effectively. Features cover voice traffic analysis, latency detection, and insightful dashboards. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance delivers effective network management but lacks the depth of packet capture and analysis found in nGeniusONE.

Room for Improvement: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE's complex interface and high cost receive criticism. Enhanced GUI could improve user experience and reduce dependence on specialized staff. Modular pricing is suggested to avoid payment for unused features. Cisco could enhance intuitive configurations and workflow integrations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, deployed on-premises with hybrid options, is known for responsive tech support but requires dedicated staff, affecting ease of deployment. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers on-premises and cloud compatibility with less complex setups and accessible support, earning higher user satisfaction.

Pricing and ROI: NETSCOUT nGeniusONE's pricing is premium, with reliability and capabilities that offset costs, but not all users make full use of its features. Licensing rigidity can lead to accumulating costs, though ROI is achieved through decreased troubleshooting time. Cisco's competitive pricing offers ROI through quick resolutions and improved customer satisfaction, reinforcing its value proposition.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

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)

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

28th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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 NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is 1.2%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE	1.2%
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance	0.7%
Other	98.1%

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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EdwardShim

General Manager at MOCOMSYS

Offers detailed network monitoring but requires improvement in deployment complexity and pricing

The price is really high, making it difficult for many financial companies to purchase immediately; it will take time for them to afford any budget for the purchase. The traffic data correlation feature's effectiveness with performance issues for clients remains uncertain as there are questions that need to be addressed through engineers regarding how many customers are actually using it. Regarding pricing and value for money, while the solution has the potential to save time and money for clients in the long term, monitoring solutions for performance management or network monitoring do not cause immediate damage to a company. It could lead to damage over time, but financial and management teams typically cannot see the immediate crisis. This is why many big companies Samsung and Hyundai try to build their own monitoring solutions using open-source tools and their own engineers, though it has not been successful.

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

"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."

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

"This solution has helped to improve the interaction between our network, datacenter, and application teams. I have used other tools, but this tool can pinpoint the root cause of my application or network issue in the majority of the cases. So, it helps different divisions or groups in the IT department to troubleshoot together and get an issue resolved. This tool helps a lot in our day-to-day networking application and IT operations."

"The feature I used to like the most was its ability to decode layer seven protocols, although this is becoming less useful now that encryption is so widespread."

"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."

"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..."

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

"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 biggest benefit is the ability to do low-level packet inspection. When I say packet inspection, I don't mean looking at payload, but just looking at your communication handshakes and the like. It reduces troubleshooting time because you can get a much better view into the communications path between servers, database servers, web servers, and understand what's going on."

"It is the ability to collect data and analyze it, especially key performance indicators. This is before a customer would call to the service center to complain that they have had bad coverage or a dropped call."

"The most valuable feature is visibility."

"The best feature is when we have it connected permanently via TAPs. That enables us to constantly collect data and then we can go back in time... To be able to rewind, back in time, and see the problem as it happened, is very helpful."

"The support is good."

"With the Vprobes, we quickly identified issues on the application servers, which we normally couldn't, where it usually would be a full circle round between our NOC and server people."

"The details it provides are among the most valuable features; the ability to drill down and get to the packet level."

"The product is very good. We have very few problems."

More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons

"Trying to set up dashboards is hard to figure out at times, if you don't do it every day. It's not really intuitive to set them all up... If there were a wizard to take us through, step-by-step, creating dashboards and the like, that would be really helpful."

"A lot of tools highlight what's going on but they don't actually pinpoint the user experience. It would be good if there were a small message or something highlighting what the user experience is like and any degradation that's actually occurring."

"One of the products we use is SolarWinds, and it provides a very cool mapping of an agent from end-to-end. If NETSCOUT could somehow implement that into their design... make it quicker and easier to get those net paths, it would be huge."

"There was a point in GTP where we were creating services on nodes and after that we wanted to have services on APN. We can't have both... There are some limitations with these types of things. When we would like to use a feature, we have to remove another one."

"The scalability needs some work. From a probe perspective, we are limited to a certain amount of throughput on the devices themselves. Without having actual hooks into the bare metal hardware for the solutions, it's a bit of a "thumb in the air" as to when we hit our capacity or when our high watermark is."

"Our biggest area of concern right now, supporting the applications, is that while NETSCOUT does a good job of monitoring the network and the applications, we need more visibility into system health and performance monitoring."

"The current solution is not easy to scale, because it is an appliance-based solution. So, you have to swap everything out."

"I would like more in-depth convergence between all the applications, especially when I look for information through a data mine."

More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Pricing is a little bit expensive."

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice

"It is a little overall pricey and expensive, but you get what you pay for."

"Their pricing is very competitive with other solutions... But what I like about NETSCOUT's licensing is that it's shared across all their platforms. They don't create a new licensing scheme for every one of their products. So for nGeniusONE, you buy a certain license level, and it works on all of their products."

"Like any company, we always want better pricing. The pricing is okay, but it's not a cheap solution. When you want to deploy it across an enterprise as large as ours, you go into seven figures. It's not a cheap solution to get out there."

"If you are able and you are willing to use everything that Netscout provides to you, it's probably a relatively fair price. The problem is that it's such a large and such a complex tool that I'm not sure that many companies would be able to use it entirely, the way it's expected to be used."

"Cost is probably the biggest drawback. Compared to some of the newer vendors that have popped up in the space, it's definitely more on the expensive side... [But] it's been able to keep its value, even in the face of the cheaper competition."

"I rate the price of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE a four out of five."

"The platform is expensive."

"This solution has saved us more than $50,000 a month and freed up 30 percent of our bandwidth."

More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

23%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

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	14
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	37

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

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

I would say if it’s an ISP that will build a scrubbing center, Netscout/Arbor is a good solution. In all other solutions, Imperva is a great choice.

See all answers

What do you like most about NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NETSCOUT nGeniusONE?

Regarding its high price, I give NETSCOUT nGeniusONE a seven.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 6% of the time

Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 6% of the time

ManageEngine OpManager vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 5% of the time

eG Enterprise vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance

Compared 3% of the time

More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors

SolarWinds NPM vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

Compared 9% of the time

Dynatrace vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

Compared 8% of the time

ThousandEyes vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

Compared 7% of the time

Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

Compared 5% of the time

Datadog vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

Compared 5% of the time

More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Competitors

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

NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

January 2026

Download NETSCOUT nGeniusONE product report

Also Known As

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

NETSCOUT nGenius, nGeniusONE

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 nGenius Real-Time Monitor software provides you with tools to monitor and display information about your network both historically and in real time. The nGenius Real-Time Monitor software allows you to understand your current network usage and to plan for future needs. It also allows you to proactively troubleshoot problem areas in your network.

NETSCOUT

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

Cerner Corporation

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE

February 2026

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