Application and Network Performance Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
2023-01-09T17:49:24Z
Jan 9, 2023
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.
I'm working on the 20.4 or 20.5 version of Accedian Skylight. My customers use Accedian Skylight on-premises. In my company, ten people use Accedian Skylight. My company is an Accedian partner. I'd recommend Accedian Skylight and other Accedian products to potential customers. My rating for Accedian Skylight is ten out of ten because it's an excellent product.
We are a relatively new partner. We certainly haven't explored the full gamut of the suite. There is a lot more work to do, especially with dashboard creation, dashboard optimization, and customization. In terms of the sensors, we're only using that in a very small manner. We are probably 25 to 30 percent along with our journey in that scenario. We do use the solution for performance and traffic monitoring of cloud environment as part of our demo set. We are able to look at cloud apps and cloud environments, more from a monitoring solution. We don't actually have anything virtually in the cloud at the moment. We have been using response times out of things like Office 365 and some of our CRM tools, but we haven't deployed anything in AWS or Azure. We can look at the traffic, where the response times and those applications are being hosted, etc., so we can sort of break down what applications are performing well. We provide tools to our clients based on answering issues that they need. We see a differentiator between this toolsets and others. It gives us some insight into helping clients size up network and analytics solutions. To get value out of a tool set, you need to have an idea of what you are trying to achieve to start off with. We see so many people who just want to stop monitoring traffic because there's no objective to monitoring traffic, and there's no objective to what they're trying to do. They just go, "We just want to see what's going on." Half the challenge that we have with people is helping guide them along the way to work out what they want to see, how they want to see it, how they want to presented it, and what sort of information are they trying to looking for: * Are they interested in application issues? * Are they interested in network issues? * Are they interested in trying to work out application versus network? * Where do we start looking at things? * Are they trying to look at it from a set of sites? * Are they trying to look at it from the users' perspectives? We try to understand what they are trying to use it for. There are toolsets out there that will do a lot of things for you really well. Ultimately, you need to work out what you're trying to achieve. If you're just trying to look for up-down scenarios, then Accedian will not give you too much information. However, if you're trying to understand where the latency in your network is, where you're seeing packet loss, and when you're seeing bad response times, then that's where these sorts of tools help you. One of our things is we just try and help people understand what they are looking for and guide companies about what to do. At the end of the day, we're just trying to help people make the right decision so everyone's happy in the long run. They are a solid eight out of 10. If you look at the way that they do link-to-link testing, Accedian does it better than anyone else. I also like their Skylight sensor, TWAMP testing, and analytics. They do need a little more work on their analytics and adding Layer 7.
CTO at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2020-11-03T07:14:00Z
Nov 3, 2020
My team tells me that Skylight's UI and single pane of glass are adequate. We're headed toward using Accedian for performance and traffic monitoring of cloud environments. That Layer 7 application will do the performance from quadrants and sections of our network to the outside world. They have capabilities in places like Azure and third-parties, kind of like Speedtest.net or Fast.com on steroids. We just haven't evolved to that yet. But that's what I expect. If I can get mortgage companies to install devices on their networks, it will be a homerun. They may choose not to do it. I'm able to reach out to the CIOs and CTOs at pretty large institutions and get them to contemplate the possibility of putting these in place. If I could put one of these in place and could hit a button in a second and get it sorted out, that would be the next evolution; to really press it in the cloud. At this point, we just have to walk before we can run, but that is on the roadmap as we continue to evolve and utilize the services from Accedian. I completely understand why major, well-known companies, and 60 percent of the worldwide global telecommunications world, use this. You need to be someone like me who cares about 10-Gbps internet perfection to really bring it in-house and educate teams as to what it's capable of, but once you get there, it's pretty extraordinary. In the old days, you'd run an EXFO test. They would show up at a branch in the middle of the night, hit a beam from their location to another one, tell you reasons why at 10 Gbps it can't test that high, or that their equipment wasn't right, or whatever. And they would say, "Yep, certified. Zero packet loss." But that's one moment, one time, yet technology and networks live and breathe, literally grow and compress, in real time, every single day of the year. That method was instant failure. This system is the diametric opposite. We have things in-line and we have them on SAN ports, and the way we are able to monitor the traffic gives us a 100 percent understanding of whether the traffic is flowing as expected. If we want to do saturation tests, without moving one person or one body around the entire Southern California/Nevada/Central California area, on a whim, we can throw new data packets at will. That capability is extraordinary. I would rate Skylight at 10 out of 10, and I usually never give better than a "B". But they do a really great job. They have killed themselves to get this thing right. Ten wouldn't be the norm for me. You've got to be extraordinary. Spend a second and a half with me and you'll understand why.
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2025.
Accedian has a security product as well. The same information and data that we collect for the passive monitoring solution (PVX). They can analyze the same exact data to identify any security threats. We are doing proof of concept with them. There are a lot of security vendors in the market right now, so we have compared their solution with other vendors. We haven't purchased the security side of Accedian yet, but we are looking into it. This tool is definitely worth looking into, no matter which industry you are in, because it generalizes all the problems an IT department has at each company in the circuit and in the application. I would give it a nine or nine point five out of 10. It is a good product to own. They are a stable company, which has the technical skills to produce a product like this.
The scale we are dealing with exceeds the capability of most performance management tools, so we're keen on seeing systems that scale to support the millions of people who consume BBC media.
It provides a better view of your infrastructure. You know better when the big flows are going through. It gives us a better picture of where the pain points are. For instance, if there is big traffic between 9 pm and 2 AM, that's due to the backups. It gives a better overview of how the data flows are working. We have VMware onsite but we are not using an external cloud so we are not using it for performance and traffic monitoring of a cloud environment. We currently have four people using the tool: me and two people on the network team and one person on the end-user computing team, because sometimes people complain that their PC is slow. People are already aware that it exists within our organization. The next step is to extend it to a few people. There is a notion of the privacy of the data. We can't give the tool to everybody. Otherwise, they will see that Mister X is surfing on this website, etc. It's very important for our organization to have this under control. So maybe there will be two or three more people using it, but not 100 people.
I used the first version, it was called Secure Active. After that, its name was Performance Vision. And now it's Skylight. With each new version of Skylight, there are a lot of new features. I am the principal user of Skylight. When anybody in the service - about 20 people - has a problem, they come to me and I generate the reports. But I'm the only one who uses SkyLIGHT. We don't have any plans to expand usage as of now.
Network Architect at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
2019-03-03T11:18:00Z
Mar 3, 2019
Put some thought into how you want to organize your zone information before you start. Play around with zones at the beginning but don't keep that setup as something you want to really use. As soon as you have an idea of how it works, put some thought into how you really want to go with it in the future. Then reorganize it so that it works the way you really want it to be, following that structure. Then start finding some issues. And trust the other teams that they'll start do their things as well, so that you start to get a clean network. Having a clean network makes it way easier later on to find issues. I thought I had a clean network. I didn't. If you already have ten or 20 issues that are all doing bad stuff, it's going to be way harder to find out why this new thing created new issues, because you already have a lot of issues. Cleaning up the issues after you've used Skylight is pretty important - and you're going to find issues. I don't think it helps me with minimizing downtime. If the network is not working, Skylight is not going to help either because it looks into the traffic from the network. If the network is not working, I'm not getting much information. We don't use Skylight for performance and traffic monitoring of cloud environments at the moment. We are not using any cloud solution at the moment on a production basis. It's only in some test cases. It might be possible in the future, and then Skylight might be quite handy. I have no idea how it works, but I saw that Skylight has some new stuff about cloud. What's interesting also about Skylight is that it's not going to show you the issue that may be the cause of your troubles at that point in time. It's going to show you all the issues that could be the cause. Usually there are four, five, or six issues that you didn't notice simply because you had enough capacity, so the service didn't have any issues. And then you'll get a seventh issue and that seventh issue does start to create a problem. You're going to look for that seventh issue, not for the first six issues that were there too, when you still had enough capacity to make it work. It's not going to show one issue. It's going to show them all, which is a great thing and a bad thing. It's going to be clear that you don't have one issue, you have multiple issues. Of course, when you fix them all, you're going to be really happy and you'll have a much better network. If you want to do it right, it's going to take you a while to fix your issues on the network. You don't have to. You can always say, "I don't care about these and those issues. They're just some side things and they're not really important." If you don't have the time, don't fix them. Just keep in mind that you still have those issues. In terms of direct users, it's just me and my two colleagues. All the users at my company total around 1,000-plus people. They get use out of it because the network keeps on working. It's not really used heavily at the moment. We use it when there are issues. Most of the issues have been resolved. It has become a troubleshooting tool now. When there's an issue, we look into it. And that's when it shines. I could use it for other things also, but I don't. We're not really looking into it for that either. For me, it's just a Swiss Army knife for a lot of things. Something I have next to my other tools. I use a latency monitor. I use a bandwidth monitor. I use Netdisco, which is an inventory manager for all MAC addresses. I have Skylight. I have five or six different kinds of network tools, and Skylight is one of those specialized tools that I can use for a lot of stuff at the same time.
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...
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.
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.
I'm working on the 20.4 or 20.5 version of Accedian Skylight. My customers use Accedian Skylight on-premises. In my company, ten people use Accedian Skylight. My company is an Accedian partner. I'd recommend Accedian Skylight and other Accedian products to potential customers. My rating for Accedian Skylight is ten out of ten because it's an excellent product.
It's a good product, and I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.
We are a relatively new partner. We certainly haven't explored the full gamut of the suite. There is a lot more work to do, especially with dashboard creation, dashboard optimization, and customization. In terms of the sensors, we're only using that in a very small manner. We are probably 25 to 30 percent along with our journey in that scenario. We do use the solution for performance and traffic monitoring of cloud environment as part of our demo set. We are able to look at cloud apps and cloud environments, more from a monitoring solution. We don't actually have anything virtually in the cloud at the moment. We have been using response times out of things like Office 365 and some of our CRM tools, but we haven't deployed anything in AWS or Azure. We can look at the traffic, where the response times and those applications are being hosted, etc., so we can sort of break down what applications are performing well. We provide tools to our clients based on answering issues that they need. We see a differentiator between this toolsets and others. It gives us some insight into helping clients size up network and analytics solutions. To get value out of a tool set, you need to have an idea of what you are trying to achieve to start off with. We see so many people who just want to stop monitoring traffic because there's no objective to monitoring traffic, and there's no objective to what they're trying to do. They just go, "We just want to see what's going on." Half the challenge that we have with people is helping guide them along the way to work out what they want to see, how they want to see it, how they want to presented it, and what sort of information are they trying to looking for: * Are they interested in application issues? * Are they interested in network issues? * Are they interested in trying to work out application versus network? * Where do we start looking at things? * Are they trying to look at it from a set of sites? * Are they trying to look at it from the users' perspectives? We try to understand what they are trying to use it for. There are toolsets out there that will do a lot of things for you really well. Ultimately, you need to work out what you're trying to achieve. If you're just trying to look for up-down scenarios, then Accedian will not give you too much information. However, if you're trying to understand where the latency in your network is, where you're seeing packet loss, and when you're seeing bad response times, then that's where these sorts of tools help you. One of our things is we just try and help people understand what they are looking for and guide companies about what to do. At the end of the day, we're just trying to help people make the right decision so everyone's happy in the long run. They are a solid eight out of 10. If you look at the way that they do link-to-link testing, Accedian does it better than anyone else. I also like their Skylight sensor, TWAMP testing, and analytics. They do need a little more work on their analytics and adding Layer 7.
My team tells me that Skylight's UI and single pane of glass are adequate. We're headed toward using Accedian for performance and traffic monitoring of cloud environments. That Layer 7 application will do the performance from quadrants and sections of our network to the outside world. They have capabilities in places like Azure and third-parties, kind of like Speedtest.net or Fast.com on steroids. We just haven't evolved to that yet. But that's what I expect. If I can get mortgage companies to install devices on their networks, it will be a homerun. They may choose not to do it. I'm able to reach out to the CIOs and CTOs at pretty large institutions and get them to contemplate the possibility of putting these in place. If I could put one of these in place and could hit a button in a second and get it sorted out, that would be the next evolution; to really press it in the cloud. At this point, we just have to walk before we can run, but that is on the roadmap as we continue to evolve and utilize the services from Accedian. I completely understand why major, well-known companies, and 60 percent of the worldwide global telecommunications world, use this. You need to be someone like me who cares about 10-Gbps internet perfection to really bring it in-house and educate teams as to what it's capable of, but once you get there, it's pretty extraordinary. In the old days, you'd run an EXFO test. They would show up at a branch in the middle of the night, hit a beam from their location to another one, tell you reasons why at 10 Gbps it can't test that high, or that their equipment wasn't right, or whatever. And they would say, "Yep, certified. Zero packet loss." But that's one moment, one time, yet technology and networks live and breathe, literally grow and compress, in real time, every single day of the year. That method was instant failure. This system is the diametric opposite. We have things in-line and we have them on SAN ports, and the way we are able to monitor the traffic gives us a 100 percent understanding of whether the traffic is flowing as expected. If we want to do saturation tests, without moving one person or one body around the entire Southern California/Nevada/Central California area, on a whim, we can throw new data packets at will. That capability is extraordinary. I would rate Skylight at 10 out of 10, and I usually never give better than a "B". But they do a really great job. They have killed themselves to get this thing right. Ten wouldn't be the norm for me. You've got to be extraordinary. Spend a second and a half with me and you'll understand why.
Accedian has a security product as well. The same information and data that we collect for the passive monitoring solution (PVX). They can analyze the same exact data to identify any security threats. We are doing proof of concept with them. There are a lot of security vendors in the market right now, so we have compared their solution with other vendors. We haven't purchased the security side of Accedian yet, but we are looking into it. This tool is definitely worth looking into, no matter which industry you are in, because it generalizes all the problems an IT department has at each company in the circuit and in the application. I would give it a nine or nine point five out of 10. It is a good product to own. They are a stable company, which has the technical skills to produce a product like this.
I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10). If they add exporting data to PDF, I could made the rating a 10.
The scale we are dealing with exceeds the capability of most performance management tools, so we're keen on seeing systems that scale to support the millions of people who consume BBC media.
It provides a better view of your infrastructure. You know better when the big flows are going through. It gives us a better picture of where the pain points are. For instance, if there is big traffic between 9 pm and 2 AM, that's due to the backups. It gives a better overview of how the data flows are working. We have VMware onsite but we are not using an external cloud so we are not using it for performance and traffic monitoring of a cloud environment. We currently have four people using the tool: me and two people on the network team and one person on the end-user computing team, because sometimes people complain that their PC is slow. People are already aware that it exists within our organization. The next step is to extend it to a few people. There is a notion of the privacy of the data. We can't give the tool to everybody. Otherwise, they will see that Mister X is surfing on this website, etc. It's very important for our organization to have this under control. So maybe there will be two or three more people using it, but not 100 people.
I used the first version, it was called Secure Active. After that, its name was Performance Vision. And now it's Skylight. With each new version of Skylight, there are a lot of new features. I am the principal user of Skylight. When anybody in the service - about 20 people - has a problem, they come to me and I generate the reports. But I'm the only one who uses SkyLIGHT. We don't have any plans to expand usage as of now.
Put some thought into how you want to organize your zone information before you start. Play around with zones at the beginning but don't keep that setup as something you want to really use. As soon as you have an idea of how it works, put some thought into how you really want to go with it in the future. Then reorganize it so that it works the way you really want it to be, following that structure. Then start finding some issues. And trust the other teams that they'll start do their things as well, so that you start to get a clean network. Having a clean network makes it way easier later on to find issues. I thought I had a clean network. I didn't. If you already have ten or 20 issues that are all doing bad stuff, it's going to be way harder to find out why this new thing created new issues, because you already have a lot of issues. Cleaning up the issues after you've used Skylight is pretty important - and you're going to find issues. I don't think it helps me with minimizing downtime. If the network is not working, Skylight is not going to help either because it looks into the traffic from the network. If the network is not working, I'm not getting much information. We don't use Skylight for performance and traffic monitoring of cloud environments at the moment. We are not using any cloud solution at the moment on a production basis. It's only in some test cases. It might be possible in the future, and then Skylight might be quite handy. I have no idea how it works, but I saw that Skylight has some new stuff about cloud. What's interesting also about Skylight is that it's not going to show you the issue that may be the cause of your troubles at that point in time. It's going to show you all the issues that could be the cause. Usually there are four, five, or six issues that you didn't notice simply because you had enough capacity, so the service didn't have any issues. And then you'll get a seventh issue and that seventh issue does start to create a problem. You're going to look for that seventh issue, not for the first six issues that were there too, when you still had enough capacity to make it work. It's not going to show one issue. It's going to show them all, which is a great thing and a bad thing. It's going to be clear that you don't have one issue, you have multiple issues. Of course, when you fix them all, you're going to be really happy and you'll have a much better network. If you want to do it right, it's going to take you a while to fix your issues on the network. You don't have to. You can always say, "I don't care about these and those issues. They're just some side things and they're not really important." If you don't have the time, don't fix them. Just keep in mind that you still have those issues. In terms of direct users, it's just me and my two colleagues. All the users at my company total around 1,000-plus people. They get use out of it because the network keeps on working. It's not really used heavily at the moment. We use it when there are issues. Most of the issues have been resolved. It has become a troubleshooting tool now. When there's an issue, we look into it. And that's when it shines. I could use it for other things also, but I don't. We're not really looking into it for that either. For me, it's just a Swiss Army knife for a lot of things. Something I have next to my other tools. I use a latency monitor. I use a bandwidth monitor. I use Netdisco, which is an inventory manager for all MAC addresses. I have Skylight. I have five or six different kinds of network tools, and Skylight is one of those specialized tools that I can use for a lot of stuff at the same time.