DX Spectrum Reviews

The network monitoring features are the product’s most valuable, due to the lack of these capabilities in any other monitoring tool. No other application monitors networks as well as Spectrum.

Free tools are available to do what its other features do, such as server monitoring (CPU/memory/disk).

We are not using the latest version of the tool yet, but as far as I know, I think an improving reporting of data would be a good idea. The report area is very poor and we cannot work properly with additional information and the custom reports. We just use the default report for information that we have inside the database for these reports.

I've been working with this tool for eight years.

To be honest, Spectrum is one of the most stable and less problematic solutions that we work with. It’s easy to scale and to deploy. The only time we’ve had problems with it was with some upgrading processes. It is not so intuitive and you have to make sure everything is correct.

The CA support team is really capable and efficient when it comes to Spectrum. Most of the time they help us surprisingly fast and correctly.

I’ve worked with free tools such as Zabbix / Nagios. Right now, we only work with CA products and, as I’ve written, Spectrum is the way to go when you need networking monitoring.

Setting up general monitoring is straightforward. However, if you need something different than the standard setup, some customizations need to be done. Thus, it becomes more complex as a whole.

We have an ongoing vendor support team and we have an in-house one. For implementation advice, I would say to always plan your monitoring according to what you really need to monitor on your environment. Most of the problems we find today are related to operation process issues and not the tool at all. People have to know what they want before implementing the solution.

As I’ve written, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.

The most valuable feature for us is that we can model a large variety of devices and receive SNMP traps from them.

It allows us to respond to network events, and we have a surveillance department that monitors all these inbound reports and we can get people dispatched right away.

A lot of things are internal development, like we'll have a network alert and we've got it configured so that it can open a trouble ticket and service management system. You know, a lot of features like that are the ones that we can develop internally without necessarily having it added to the software release, but it would be nice to have it added nevertheless.

Not really on the CA site itself. We may have put under-powered servers running the application or things like that and those are some issues that we're working on internally to actually make it supported by CA. A lot of it really has to do with how much time you invest in setting it up and having the right hardware.

I haven't personally called them.

I didn't do the initial setup as far as installing the application. I've done a lot of tweaking of views of what the user should see and things like that and that's not difficult.

It's really tough to say because it really does have a lot to do with how much time you put into it. If we had a crew that just completely dialed in everything and set it up, had the right hardware, it's kind of a totally different question than if, internally, you developed it on unsupported hardware, didn't spend much time setting it up.

We've had a few previous competitors over the years that I've worked with the company. Spectrum can do SNMP inquiries and alert you that a device is totally unreachable. With some of our previous platforms it was a one way process.

Go for it. Try the best you can to start out fully within specifications and that kind of thing. We're going back and fixing all that now, which we might not have had to.

• Root cause analysis
• Configurations management
• Device compatibility features (buit-in, MIBs and device self-certification)

Not from my organization, but for our customers. They managed to monitor their infrastructure at a deeper level, more detailed and technical specific view (NOC-like and NOC-compliant features), and of course at different levels (IT management, IT operational etc.). Also, by integrating with other products like CA Unified Infrastructure Management or CA Service Desk Manager, you can achieve a greater value.

The graphical interface is still designed in an old fashioned way, and they should include some management views in a much more modern manner.

I have been implementing it for three years.

Spectrum is a very stable product. It is a mature product, with a long life time in CA’s portfolio, and even before.

Spectrum is a very scalable product. You can add more than one SpectroServers for balancing and availability.

It's very good, 10/10.

Very good, also for device self-certification, development. There is also a very strong community (actually multiple communities) – 10/10

I have used and implemented the old product, CA Infrastructure Management, which included Spectrum, but also I am implementing CA UIM.

The initial setup is straightforward, and after the initial setup you can start the device discovery. You can configure multiple discovery profiles and schedule them as you please. After discovery, you can see devices and servers in the universe and you can start to manage them.

The configuration is easy, but it depends on the device’s technology. The discovery is very easy to do and the topology view is customizable.

Although Spectrum is an easy to install and have it ready to use product, it is a very complex solution and it can be customized in so many ways. So, for large environments or NOCs I would definitely recommend specialized implement team like from CA’s partners or CA Services.

The other option from CA is CA Unified Infrastructure Management, but it lacks for configuration management feature. It is positioned differently on the market.

I do not know any other product better for NOCs. When you start researching for this kind of solution, you should have prepared a list with all your devices you want to manage, and features you want from this solution. Usually the number and type of the devices is important.

Don't consider this product a service desk product. It is an infrastructure management product with some light features for incident management. Spectrum is great for what it does as a management tool. You can monitor your infrastructure, manage events and alarms as you please (aggregation, alarm suppressing, thresholds, rules, etc.), manage configurations for network devices (depends on the management capabilities of the device), monitor SLAs and other great stuff like these.

• The ease of discovery of managed devices into the tool set
• The ease of placement of managed devices into the tool set
• The integration with CA Service Desk
• Email integration

Since Spectrum is integrated with our Service Desk, implementation alerts generate a USD request which then fire off notifications to the responsible engineers.

The ability to import new MIBs and manage new devices.

I've used it for nine years.

No issues encountered.

Only if the server that hosts the application is restarted without bringing down Spectrum. If this occurs it corrupts the database and has to be restored from the backup.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

Yes, we used TNG, which was impossible to manage.

It was straightforward. It has the ability to discover your environment and devices easily.

We used a combination of an in-house team and a vendor team. The expertise of the vendor team was good.

For network management, this application is by far the best.

• Global deployment for AIG NOC
• Deployment in customer networks, as well as multi-tenant deployment at Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) 
  

The Spectrum tool improved our network assurance levels for our business units. However, the CA Technologies sales team destroyed their relationship with our business units.

• Monitoring
• The dashboard 

It needs better integration with other CA products.

This product automates much of what is involved in monitoring. For instance, device discovery can be performed in any of a number of ways with minimal manual intervention. The model catalog in Spectrum (digital models for various physical or virtual devices) is very extensive so, in most cases, monitoring uses device models that precisely match the actual device. This provides excellent tailored monitoring ability. Spectrum can be set up as fully fault-tolerant and in that scenario, it can provide near 100% monitoring up-time; five-nines monitoring up-time is certainly attainable.

A good example would be our world map. This organization is international. We built a zoom-able world map in Spectrum depicting every company site in every nation and US state. The maps provide a true “at a glance” view of issues across company sites. Roll-up is user-definable. The maps are also very popular with visitors and customers since they are attractive and it is obvious at a glance what they depict. The fact that Spectrum provides the ability to build and link these maps is a real plus.

CA works continuously to upgrade this product, adding new abilities and fixing bugs. They do a very creditable job. The areas I am aware of that could use improvement are fairly minor; for example, the ability to sort lists in the Discovery Console. Things like that. CA provides a good customer feedback mechanism they have dubbed “the idea wall”. Suggestions for improvements, expansions, etc., can be posted there. These ideas are often incorporated into CA products.

I have used this product for six years.

Occasionally, usually after an upgrade, we see a few issues but these are almost always cleared up quickly by opening a case with CA. The only “stability” issue would be very occasional problems with the “Archive Manager” component (manages the event DB) stopping and requiring restart. I would characterize stability issues with Spectrum as rare.

We had no scalability problems at all. Spectrum is a supremely scalable product. The recent upgrade of Spectrum to 64-bit has dramatically increased the already very good scalability.

Technical support for CA Spectrum is excellent and seems to me to be in a state of continuous improvement/refinement. I would rate the technical support as 95/100.

This organization previously used the IBM Tivoli product.

Setup is relatively straightforward and with the support of the CA technical staff, it proceeds very straightforwardly. Spectrum can be implemented entirely on virtual devices, as it is here. Training is available and purchase usually includes a certain amount of training credits.

We evaluated IBM Tivoli and BMC Patrol/TrueSight.

This is a very good, refined product that, in the fault-tolerant configuration, approaches being bulletproof. Allow extra time for installation, setup and familiarization. This is not due to installation and setup complexities but more due to the richness and extensive capability of this product.

We consolidated multiple enterprise monitoring tools into a single toolset (using UIM and Spectrum integrated) that provides a vision of services, topologies, network configuration backup, network configuration scripts to configure devices in groups, MPLS vision, VPN vision, global collections to give a vision of branches, and ability to group network devices by priority.

Besides the technical benefits described, CA UIM and CA Spectrum were the key factors in increasing the SLA from the IT environment to 99.99%, from the 99.5% achieved without CA solutions. This achievement completely changed the way how LoBs see and recognize IT as their partners, avoiding the blame game and finger-pointing. After improving the SLA metrics, the next step was to get closer to the LoBs and provide relevant dashboards, punting together business views and emphasizing how it is related to IT, and vice versa.

After several weeks, this partnership and closer communication between IT and LoBs resulted in some dependency of LoB on UIM dashboards (i.e., every hour executive and tactical dashboards are sent to the senior executives). It is impressive how important it is to be connected with LoBs using simple, visual and intuitive dashboards that remove the roadblocks between IT and the entire organization.

• Integrations with other CA products 
• A better way to create reports

I have used it for eight years.

I’m a CA beta tester and found all issues that need to be solved in this program. I have no stability issues in my production environment.

I did not previously use a different solution.

This is a very stable product. It helps us to be proactive and prevents the company from losing money and business, by monitoring the entire network (data and voice) of the company (head office and branches) in real time, showing exactly where errors occur.

With CA Spectrum Southbound Gateway, it is possible to receive alarm data and turn it into events. With events, it is possible to correlate ICs, other events and shape any function to its will.

The southbound gateway can receive data from third party sources, other monitoring products, like SCOM from Microsoft, using the Southbound Gateway you can centralize all Management in one view, you receive SNMP data from other tools and turns in events, events in CA Spectrum turns in to Alarms, QOS or reports.

With CA Spectrum, we are now able to monitor more proactively network assets, reduce the total downtime of these and prevent money from being lost for device stoppages. The tool also gave us an event integrator for all other solutions, including non-CA solutions, forming a consolidated view of all information sent. From customized polices, we can standardize device nomenclature, facilitating the opening of external tickets and improve tracking them.

The EventDisp Logic (Code) is too complex.

I have used it for one year.

I have not encountered any deployment issues.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is excellent.

Technical support is an expert team.

I previously used Nagios and Zabbix, but CA Spectrum is more efficient.

Initial setup is easy, but configuration properties and EventDisp is quite complex.

A vendor team implemented it, but I participated.

CA Spectrum have a good model of licensing; the prices are based on types of models. If you understand the event processing code (Southbound Gateway), you will reduce the licensing price by more than 50%.

CA Spectrum is a powerful product for monitoring network ICs; if you master the EventDisp logic and the Southbound Gateway Toolkit everything, becomes easier.

It is important to remember that with the size of product, some caution should be taken.