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DX Spectrum vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

DX Spectrum
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
22nd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
22nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
116
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (6th), Network Troubleshooting (7th), DX NetOps (1st)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
4th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
157
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of DX Spectrum is 1.1%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 5.2%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

DickBaker - PeerSpot reviewer
An all-inclusive monitoring solution that adapts to emerging technologies
The product helps to correlate events.  The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability. DX Spectrum needs better documentation on its complex features.  I have been using the product since 2005.  I rate DX Spectrum's stability an eight point five…
MohitKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The capability of handling and monitoring with SNMP and working with the SNMP traps is much better than other products."
"​It covers a lot of different types of hardware. It can do a lot and saves us time.​"
"We can plan changes and replacement of end-of-life products in our environment very well because it's very accurate."
"​The stability of the product is key. It never breaks, really. The stability and reliability of the Spectrum product have been top-notch.​"
"It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one."
"Some of the most valuable features are it's highly scalable, the carrier is great, and if something has SNMP, it can monitor it. It's a great network fault management solution."
"The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability."
"The containerization of different objects was very helpful in building an org structure. Being able to separately manage your MSP clients with separate visibility was also helpful."
"A product that is well-tested and trusted in demanding situations."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds NPM is the performance monitoring to see the memory, and CPU utilization."
"The solution ranks as one of the top five monitoring tools."
"For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds NPM are network performance monitoring and the overall benefit for servers."
"SolarWinds is reasonably priced."
"We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM."
"I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable."
 

Cons

"It needs better integration with other CA products."
"For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts."
"If the integration is simplified or improved, it will be a unique selling point in comparison to the competition on the market."
"OS monitoring needs to be better developed, as well as their services, e.g., cluster monitoring, URLs, etc."
"I would like to see CA move Spectrum, Performance Manager, and some of their other tools moved to a SaaS based model. You see a lot of other manufacturers which are moving toward SaaS based models."
"We want to make our own choice for the AIOps solution and do not want to be forced to use the Broadcom OI solution by default."
"Support from Broadcom could be better. Sometimes we wait a very long time for a solution to level three problems."
"It's not a great performance management tool. Its reporting capabilities are not very good at all."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
"It would be good to have high security."
"The solution's customer service is not very good because the support takes too long."
"The solution is not always good with new features, so it's take a long time."
"The market is changing, and people are expecting automation. I think that's a disadvantage."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
"I would like to have a Syslog server module for this product. That would make the solution better."
"This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is very high."
"The cost of some of these products are a little cost prohibitive, which is unfortunate. We have to find lower cost solutions for some of the things that we have to pull in. For the most part, CA has capabilities in pretty much everything that you would need. You just have to figure out where are you going to spend the most money for what you have to actually get done. You can do all these things but, which ones do you have to do? And that's hard to choose sometimes because you want to do them all."
"Since the acquisition by Broadcom, we have not had such a good experience with licensing and pricing. Since they were bought by Broadcom, every sales contract is getting complicated. It's very complicated, and it's much more expensive than before. It's not a good pricing strategy from Broadcom."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"Spectrum is expensive."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee."
"Though I don't remember the price for SolarWinds NPM, its price is somewhat okay when you compare it with other tools in the market. The price isn't too high and isn't too low, so it's okay."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"The solution can become very expensive and commercially not viable in countries, such as India."
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
"The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
57%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about DX Spectrum?
The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Spectrum?
We are a customer of Broadcom, we use a group license that covers various CA products, including DX Spectrum. The company purchases the licenses they need from this group license, and we do not hav...
What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
Support from Broadcom could be better. Sometimes we wait a very long time for a solution to level three problems. Challenges and Limitations The only other challenge is the price, which is the main...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

CA Spectrum
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about DX Spectrum vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.