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Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE comparison

Cisco and NETSCOUT are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Cisco is ranked #40 with an average rating of 8.0, while NETSCOUT is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.5. Cisco holds a 0.9% mindshare in NMS, compared to NETSCOUT’s 1.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of NETSCOUT users who would recommend it.
Cisco Provider Connectivity...
Read 24 Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reviews
  • 1,670 Views
  • 1,083 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Read 49 NETSCOUT nGeniusONE reviews
  • 2,483 Views
  • 1,733 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 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.

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To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Report (Updated: April 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
April 2025
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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
40th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (46th)
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
19th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is 1.6%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Read full review
Ruslan Melnyk - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for network performance monitoring
My manager can explain the use cases attached to the product. I am a unit leader in my company, and I don't sell the product directly to our partners or customers. In my company, I manage certain processes and a team while building, developing, and providing them with a direction for the market. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is a good solution for network performance monitoring since it is not cloud-based. My company sells NETSCOUT nGeniusONE in eight to ten countries. I think the solution is not good for capacity planning, but it is better to help find problems in applications because not every infrastructure is good at managing working applications. I think it is a solution meant for applications. The tool is useful for solving problems attached to applications. The tool's real-time network monitoring capability was used when the product was more reactive. In our company, if we use real-time monitoring, then we need to deal with raw traffic. In our company, if we don't see any problem in the real-time systems, we have the possibility to rely on the tool since it acts like a time machine for us, which can allow us to get back to the areas of problem and solve them. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. For many users, it can be a good monitoring system that can be scaled up in the future. I think it is a good product to start with when working systems in an environment. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE is another tool used to manage raw traffic, and I find it to integrate well into our customers' network. I am not using it actively on the system. I use the tool for network packet brokers. I rate the tool a ten out of ten.
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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

"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."
"The ability to measure performance end-to-end across the cloud data center allows us to take corrective action to keep our channels online."
"One valuable feature we have is real-time monitoring for connection issues."
"The response times, with the performance, are really interesting too, where you can see the packet loss."
"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."
"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."
"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."
More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pros
"The fact that it's able to capture and store packets from the wires is very useful for troubleshooting with our vendors, when issues do come up. It's valuable that we have that overall data for them."
"The speed that you can get from the top of a problem all the way down to the packet layer of troubleshooting analysis."
"The solution helps to troubleshoot and put our hands on the weak points of customer networks."
"The solution transforms packet wire data into real-time data that is actionable. It helps us with faster detection of issues and allows us to create alerts."
"If one of our network pipes is getting plugged up by somebody using too much bandwidth, we can use the NETSCOUT tool to examine and find out what is going on."
"The ability of the dashboards is useful for discover, mapping and understanding of application behaviour."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The quick drill-down views are similar to Wireshark views. Those are quite nice, with the views on how you interpret some of the data. The granularity of how far you can drill down into milliseconds or microseconds is a very nice feature. It actually stores quite a lot of data in its database."
More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE pros
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Human resource costs can be high when dealing with connection issues."
"The Accedian Skylight user interface still has room for improvement."
"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."
More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance cons
"The stability is only fair. It goes down a lot."
"The feature I am looking for is the Arbor technology, especially to run in parallel with our firewall... It's getting there."
"Maybe the optics cost could be improved. It's not about the product itself, but the optics cost from other companies is very high, which affects the business. When you buy a $1 million product, you shouldn't be expected to pay $500,000 for support. So, support, operation, and professional services are very expensive. It's the main weakness."
"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."
"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."
"Initial setup was complex."
"here is a big issue with the special way they use InfiniStream to store data."
"On a network the size of ours, the loading times seem a little extensive, 20 or 30 seconds to load up some graphs."
More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It provides value and the cost is not huge."
"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 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."
"Pricing is a little bit expensive."
"It's not for free, clearly. But on the other hand, it offers very interesting functionality. We pay around €100,000."
More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance pricing and cost advice
"It is very expensive, but it's well worth the money."
"The platform is expensive."
"The scalability becomes very expensive quickly."
"It is a little overall pricey and expensive, but you get what you pay for."
"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."
"We have a premium customized contract for the solution."
"The biggest problem we have with this product is the expense."
"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
39%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

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.
See all answers
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 ...
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?
The pricing is a bit high yet not overly expensive. The cost depends on the size of the customer, as sizing controls the pricing.
See all answers
 

Comparisons

ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
ThousandEyes vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 43% of the time
SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 15% of the time
Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
Dynatrace vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 10% of the time
Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
Zabbix vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 6% of the time
Splunk Enterprise Security vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Logo
Splunk Enterprise Security vs Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
Compared 5% of the time
More Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance Competitors
Dynatrace vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
Dynatrace vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 12% of the time
Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 9% of the time
ThousandEyes vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
ThousandEyes vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 9% of the time
SolarWinds NPM vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
SolarWinds NPM vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 8% of the time
Datadog vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Logo
Datadog vs NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
Compared 3% of the time
More NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance
May 2025
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance reportDownload Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance product report
Buyer's Guide
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
May 2025
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE reportDownload 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 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
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
April 2025
Free Report: Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance vs. NETSCOUT nGeniusONE
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