Two of Cisco's own monitoring tools are gone. Here's what's left.
Cisco's own flagship monitoring tools for unified communications have quietly disappeared. Prime Collaboration Assurance (PCA) reached end-of-support in October 2024 with no replacement on Cisco's roadmap, and the native Webex Monitoring Service was retired in June 2024 in favour of a paid ThousandEyes integration. If you're still searching for "Cisco network monitoring tools" expecting Cisco to have a straightforward native answer, it doesn't — not anymore. This guide covers what Cisco still offers, where the gaps are, and what a multi-vendor, third-party monitoring platform needs to do to close them.
Cisco's own answer to UC monitoring has been retired — twice.
For years, Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance (PCA) was the default answer to "how do I monitor my Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) and TelePresence estate?" It offered integrated monitoring and diagnostics that helped teams resolve service quality issues before end users noticed.
That's no longer the case. Cisco's end-of-sale for PCA (select SKUs) took effect on 14 October 2021, and end-of-support followed on 31 October 2024. Beyond that date, PCA customers are on their own — no patches, no support, and, notably, no Cisco-built replacement. Organisations still running PCA today are operating an obsolete product.
Cisco's Webex side of the house saw a similar shift. The native Webex Monitoring Service — which gave admins baseline network data to help diagnose low-quality meetings — went end of life in June 2024. Cisco's current guidance is to use the ThousandEyes integration inside Control Hub instead, which brings vantage-point network path visibility into Webex troubleshooting, but as a separate, paid add-on rather than a built-in capability.
Put together, that's two of Cisco's own UC monitoring answers retired inside 18 months of each other, with no single native tool stepping in to cover both. It's a meaningful shift from the position IR covered when we first looked at the end of Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance — at the time, PCA's end-of-support date was still two years away. That date has now passed, and the "what happens after" question has moved from theoretical to immediate for any organisation still running it.
What's left is narrower than it looks.
Cisco hasn't left UC monitoring completely bare — but what remains is narrower than it looks.
Cisco Real-Time Monitoring Tool (RTMT) is still actively documented and supported for CUCM, covering device and service status, performance counters, and CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) application health. It's a genuinely useful diagnostic tool if your entire environment is CUCM. The catch: RTMT requires a Java Runtime Environment (JRE), and current releases still specify Java 8 — a dependency IT security teams increasingly want to retire, not add to. RTMT also only ever sees CUCM. It has no visibility into Webex, no visibility into anything outside Cisco, and no visibility into the network path between endpoints.
Cisco Webex Control Hub, paired with the ThousandEyes integration, is the current answer for Webex-specific monitoring. It's a real improvement over having nothing, and it gives IT teams end-to-end visibility between user locations and Webex's cloud infrastructure. But it's Webex-only, and it's an additional licensed capability layered on top of Control Hub rather than something that comes free with a Cisco UC deployment.
Neither tool talks to the other, and neither was built to sit alongside monitoring for Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Avaya — which is the reality for most enterprise UC environments today, not the exception.
Cisco Network Assistant, an older tool sometimes mentioned in the same breath as RTMT, is worth a note of caution: it has not seen active development in years and was historically capped at managing around 80 devices, making it unsuitable for enterprise-scale deployments regardless of its current support status. It's not a serious option for anyone evaluating monitoring tools in 2026.
The gap shows up at the seams between vendors.
Enterprises rarely run Cisco alone. Nearly 40% of enterprises now operate multiple telephony and collaboration platforms side by side — Cisco for core UC, Microsoft Teams for hybrid collaboration, Avaya for contact centre, or some other combination shaped by mergers, "best-of-breed" purchasing, or simple history. IR has covered this shift in more depth in managing UC&C multi-vendor reality, but the short version for monitoring specifically is this: the more vendors in the stack, the more monitoring blind spots appear at the seams between them.
Standard protocols like SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) let monitoring tools pull data from network devices regardless of vendor, and they remain the foundation most network monitoring tools are built on — see IR's broader network monitoring guide for how these fundamentals work. But Cisco's own tools are built to read Cisco data through Cisco-specific interfaces, not to normalise it alongside every other vendor's equivalent. That's the structural gap: even a fully functioning RTMT-plus-Control Hub setup only ever tells you about the Cisco half of the picture. If a call degrades somewhere between a Teams client, an Avaya contact centre queue, and a Cisco session border controller (SBC), Cisco's tools stop at the Cisco boundary — and so does your visibility.
This isn't a hypothetical edge case. It's the everyday operating reality for UC managers who inherited multiple platforms through a merger, layered in Teams for hybrid work while keeping Cisco for core telephony, or run Avaya in the contact centre alongside a Cisco UC estate everywhere else. Each vendor's admin console tells a partial story; none of them, on their own, tells IT operations whether a degraded experience started in the network, the platform, or the device.
The right criteria go well beyond "can it see Cisco."
If native tooling only covers part of the environment, the criteria for a third-party replacement should go beyond "can it see Cisco." Look for:
These criteria matter more than any single vendor comparison, because the market itself has been inconsistent lately about how to size and describe it — recent estimates of the network monitoring tools market for 2026 vary by billions of dollars depending on the research firm and how narrowly "network monitoring" is defined. Rather than lean on a single market-size figure, it's more useful to evaluate directly against the criteria above.
Is Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance still supported? No. End-of-support for PCA (select SKUs) took effect on 31 October 2024. Cisco has not announced a replacement product, so organisations still running it are on an unsupported, obsolete platform.
What replaced Cisco Prime Collaboration Assurance? Nothing, directly, from Cisco. Cisco has not released a native successor to PCA. Organisations typically move to a third-party UC monitoring and observability platform instead.
Does Cisco RTMT still work? Yes. Cisco Real-Time Monitoring Tool is still actively supported for CUCM and is documented through recent releases. It requires a Java 8 runtime environment and only covers CUCM — it doesn't extend to Webex or non-Cisco platforms.
What happened to Cisco's Webex Monitoring Service? It was retired in June 2024. Cisco now directs administrators to a ThousandEyes integration within Webex Control Hub for similar network path diagnostics, offered as a separate licensed capability.
Can I monitor Cisco and non-Cisco UC platforms in one tool? Yes — that's the core use case for third-party, multi-vendor observability platforms like IR Collaborate, which correlate data across Cisco, Microsoft Teams, Avaya, Zoom, and other platforms in a single view rather than requiring a separate tool per vendor.
Is Cisco Webex Control Hub enough on its own? Control Hub with the ThousandEyes integration covers Webex-specific network path monitoring, but it doesn't extend to CUCM, other Cisco UC components, or any non-Cisco platform. Most enterprises need it alongside broader monitoring, not as a standalone answer.
What is Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM)? CUCM, formerly Cisco Call Manager, is Cisco's centralised, software-based call processing and session management platform for voice, video, messaging, and collaboration services. Current releases run up to CUCM 15.
Why does multi-vendor UC monitoring matter if most of our environment is Cisco? Even a Cisco-majority environment usually touches other platforms somewhere — a contact centre on Avaya, hybrid meetings through Teams, or a network path that isn't Cisco-owned end to end. A monitoring gap at any one of those seams is enough to make root cause analysis slow and unreliable.
Observability that doesn't stop at the Cisco boundary.
IR Collaborate is built on the Prognosis platform to give teams observability across Cisco alongside Microsoft Teams, Avaya, Zoom, and other UC and contact centre platforms — the multi-vendor reality most enterprises actually operate in, not a single-vendor best case.
For organisations moving off Cisco Prime specifically, Collaborate covers call quality and user experience diagnostics, end-to-end troubleshooting across SBCs, servers, network, and endpoints, and dedicated experience management for Webex Meetings — closing the gap left by both PCA's retirement and the limits of Control Hub's native reporting. Full details on supported Cisco platforms and versions, including CUCM 15, Cisco TelePresence, Expressway, and Unified Border Element, are confirmed against Collaborate's current compatibility list.
Where Cisco's own tools stop at the Cisco boundary, Collaborate's proactive alerting and root cause analysis extend across the entire communications stack — which matters most in exactly the scenario IR has already documented in Cisco environments: an outage or degradation that touches more than one vendor's infrastructure at once.