Accedian Skylight Other Solutions Considered

GS
CTO at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We took a look at some of the products where the entry point was north of half-a-million dollars, if you were lucky. And, of course, we had been running SolarWinds for years. The trouble I have with most of the solutions out there is they're very geared towards the double CCIE who says, "Yep, you're fine." That could be a situation where I would say, "That's interesting because we ran a test that shows that there's a bottleneck between S-2 and the data center at 50 Mbps, and that's a 200 Mbps location. I hit one button and it's done.

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MW
President at AIP US, LLC

Accedian is very granular, meaning they collect data unlike other vendors. Other vendors collect data as well, but maybe they collect at a one-minute interval. Accedian can collect the data at one-thousandth of a second interval, which is why it is very granular. You can really know at each fraction of a second what happened with the network, which is what we need.

We have used other vendors' products as well. Their products average out. For example, if we have a network peak for one or three seconds, Accedian can tell you about the information collected, "In those three seconds, you had a burst." Other vendors, they don't do that. If you average out those three seconds over a 60-second average, it may not tell you anything. It may be very smoothed out, whereas Accedian provides live data.

Other vendors, like SolarWinds, are not competing out of the same market. They do some things that overlap each other. With other vendors, their one-minute interval, narrow overview is for presentation to executives and managers, but it is not really good for network troubleshooting.

Accedian is really more science and engineering focused. We look at each individual package and each individual data flows. It is for the next level of troubleshooting and performance monitoring. They are really on the top of all the products that we looked at it. 

While there are other products, they are very expensive. You can bring other vendors in who produce hardware, which can plug into your network. This is not Accedian hardware, they are essentially very heavy duty hardware. Accedian combines being both cost-effective and also being very science and engineering focused. They do the day-to-day work very well.

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MO
Network Architect at a recruiting/HR firm with 501-1,000 employees

We did look into alternatives a few years ago, from Riverbed and SolarWinds. You have to look at competitors. If you don't do that you're not really doing your job correctly. I wasn't really happy about doing that because I was happy with this solution, I didn't want to change. But we wanted to see what the competition had. We looked into them and realized, "Why would we want to change?" We're going to have more problems for more money, and we're going to have licensing issues, etc.

If you look into Riverbed, it's a licensing nightmare. You need to pay for every type of analysis. If there's one thing you don't want to do, it's that. When you're troubleshooting what do you need? You don't know. You've got a problem. A user complains something isn't working. You don't know why it's not working, that's why you have this solution. But then you click on a thing and it says you don't have this license. Great. So you buy the license, you can click on it, and you find the problem wasn't there. Click on something else - you don't have this license. You're going to buy stuff that you're not going to be needing, but you don't know you won't need it.

One of the great things about Skylight is you have them all, and you actually need them all, not because you have certain issues, but just to know you don't have issues with it. Just click once and see, "Okay, this looks fine. Next."

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DF
Director at PlexNet Pty Ltd

We use a company called Colasoft, which is a bit more focused on network analytics, capturing all packets, and doing detailed packet analysis. 

We have a relationship with ExtraHop, but that's probably more from a site security standpoint than it is from raw analytics. ExtraHop does sort of compete a little bit with Accedian, across more from an analytics side of things. We have used it more from a security standpoint on getting some visibility with a lot of security things. However, there is not a lot of overlap with Accedian.

We regularly work with a company called Profitap, who does a lot of network tapping, packet brokers, etc. We use products like Profitap for front-end traffic collection to feed our analytics tools. They sort of compliment Accedian. They are a TAP aggregator, which feeds data where you can do filtering and data manipulation along with killer traffic brokering or packet brokering.

We constantly look at other vendors all the time. Other vendors come to us all the time wanting us to look at their toolsets for partnering and things like that. We've looked at a few, like Gigamon, but we are sort of happy with where we are at the moment.

We don't play with SolarWinds. I think SolarWinds answers SNMP type issues for people. Their approach is getting very cheap, e.g., it starts to escalate from a price perspective, then before you know it, you spent a lot of money on SolarWinds. Therefore, we don't get involved in SolarWinds. It is not the right fit for what we do.

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AB
Manager IT Production Service at a maritime company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We tried out Dynatrace and Riverbed. It is simpler to deploy Skylight. There is no need for an agent on the server or network to collect data. Also, Skylight had the cheaper price.

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reviewer1188207 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a media company with 10,001+ employees

We're in the process of evaluating and have not chosen a solution yet.

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JB
Network Administrator at CHR Citadelle de Liège

I tried SolarWinds before, but it's more expensive.

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BJ
Freelance IT Consultant at SPW (Service Public de Wallonie)

We are a big organization with around 10,000 people and 200 sites. So we are considering other APM solutions that are highly rated in industry reviews. We are considering Dynatrace, but we have not yet purchased that product. We are still with Skylight.

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it_user192357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
it_user184044 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer with 501-1,000 employees

Yes, I had tested HP Openview, but despite its extensive offer, this product is too complex.

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it_user186786 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Information Technology at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

No, we did not.

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it_user192582 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Systems and Networking with 501-1,000 employees

Operator-options (too complex, too expensive).

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AM
Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
AM
Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Yes we evaluated ExtraHop and SolarWinds.

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Buyer's Guide
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.