I have previously used Riverbed and NETSCOUT which are similar to Accedian Skylight. They are both quite expensive, but they offer similar features.

The difference is mainly in how the pricing is structured. Additionally, the use of small probes rather than physical appliances is a notable distinction. While Riverbed requires the purchase of an appliance, Accedian Skylight sensors can be downloaded as a virtual machine, which can be more convenient in certain situations.

We still have SolarWinds, but it just doesn't do what this does. It doesn't seem to be as forward-thinking. SolarWinds tends to buy third-party companies and bring them together. But Accedian has pretty much one purpose, and one purpose only: to monitor and improve the way packets flow across networks. Whether it's SD WAN, MPLS, you name it, they're trying to figure out the best possible way to monitor and maintain it in a relatively cost-effective manner.

I started to know Accedian when I was their service provider. Back then, they had a niche as an Ethernet determination device for performance monitoring. Probably two to three years ago, Accedian created a new enterprise division. Now, they have products and solutions for enterprises, not just as service providers. I sort of know both of their product lines.

We didn't have a solution seven years ago, before this one. I know that determining problems used to be difficult. The reason why we bought Skylight, which, in the past, I knew as Secure Active, was that at that point in time we had some serious issues with printers at locations where the bandwidth usage was really high. We couldn't figure out what was happening, which jobs were the issue. With Skylight we found the exact times when printer calls were made. We saw from whom and where to; from all the sites. Something was sent to that printer and then this printer. It was just a matter of looking into the printer information and finding out what kind of print job it was. We found out that PostScript was s badly configured on some spoolers, so we needed to change the PostScript driver/configuration.

But before we had SkyLIGHT, we had months of issues and there was always a time crunch involved in figuring out why some agencies were slow. We saw peaks but we couldn't figure out why there were some serious peaks. That's when we figured out the PostScript drivers were badly configured, simply because some of printing jobs were 50 megabytes or 100 megabytes for only two or three pages. There was something terribly wrong with drivers/configuration.

Their UI is actually similar in some ways to what we used to use in a product called TruView from Fluke Networks. That was a really good product that unfortunately, when NETSCOUT bought them, they killed off. They really dropped the ball on that.

We came from using Fluke Networks and some other tools. We were involved in NETSCOUT, but moved away from them because the solution was troublesome and problematic to scale out easily and build for customers, who were getting frustrated with it. So, we found Accedian tends to be quite easy to use. The troubleshooting aspect of it is all there. With the troubleshooting, you don't have to go and configure from scratch the troubleshooting views and easy ways of looking at troubleshooting, as you do with some other tools, especially the NETSCOUT type of tools, where you have to build all the dashboards yourself. The standard dashboards and troubleshooting information are really easy to use. 

We were not using anything before this solution.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We didn't use anything before Skylight.

We are using PRTG and Nimsoft. These are more general monitoring tools, not specialized in network analysis. We are also using a network tool for latency.

My company went with Accedian Skylight because Accedian fixes the products. Accedian also secures and addresses customer needs.

No.

We have not tested similar products over the long term.

We did not previously use a different solution.

No, this was the first APM product we used.

No