DX Spectrum Reviews

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.

The topology view, Global Collections and Fault Isolation algorithms pinpoint the exact point of failure.

It gives you a proactive approach. It is almost like it can foresee what's coming fault-wise speaking, and the key is the proprietary Inductive Modeling Technology that it has that gives it that edge ahead of other products.

I think the interface needs a bit of a revamp. They need to adapt it to the new app world that it is now ruling (iOS, Android Apps), and it needs to offer more. Also, the Sizing tool is a bit old, and the last time I used it the CPU recommendations for our SpectroSERVERs given by the tool were Pentium IV. I can see that now there is an online updated tool that can assist with your design which is good.

I’ve been using it for almost eight years.

In earlier versions, the installations were a bit clunky and troublesome, but after v8 this improved dramatically, even installing large deployments were a breeze to do.

v6.6 had few hiccups, but in general it is a very mature product. It's been around since 1991 when it was owned by Cabletron.

When properly designed and you have your base installed, to scale it up or out is a walk in the park. You just need to introduce the new server, what role it has, and whether it's part of the FT environment and you’re done.

Pretty good. I must say, CA is an excellent company and their client always comes first. Every time I have worked with CA support, they were very insightful and had deep knowledge of the solution and how to tackle the issue.

Back in 2005, when I started working with Spectrum, the level of support engineers they had in the L2 was amazing! They provided deep knowledge and exact root cause solutions when I challenged them.

I tested different products before Spectrum. Tivoli was one of them, but it was too complicated and troublesome to configure and maintain. I didn’t like the interface of BMC Patrol as it wasn’t very intuitive, and HP OpenView was the same with a very unappealing GUI, and the algorithms used to keep track of changes in the network and root cause analysis very basic. I didn’t switch, it was only that I worked with these tools before working with Spectrum.

It’s not very complicated, just by following the manual guides were good enough to do a basic installation

It was an in-house implementation but I did training in America which helped me dramatically to fine tune the post-installation.

The pricing could be a bit steep if you are a mid-sized or small company, this is an enterprise product, designed and built for huge environments. Licensing used to be easy, and CA had a template depicting all the possible combinations for licensing, I don't know how easy it is nowadays.

Think big, and look to exploit all this product has to offer around Fault & Service Management. When I was the Enterprise Administrator in a big data center in South America, my motto was: if the coffee machine has a network card, we can monitor it and see if we are out of coffee. Spectrum is capable of doing this and more.

• 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.

• Scalability
• Customizability

• Automatic alerting
• Integration with incident systems
• Integration with reporting tool eHealth

Topology features need improvement, namely -

• Weight of links
• Less critical links
• High critical links weighing

I used it for seven years, but not for the last nine months.

There were some issues with deployment.

Sometimes a restart of the Tomcat Daemon was required, and sometimes the archive manager ran out of resources.

No issues with scalability.

We used the mailing list as a support forum - which was very alive with skilled professionals and their invaluable experience.

We did not consult them, as we used the forum.

It's straightforward - install, and run.

We implemented it in-house.

I can only say that we had three engineers working full time on the system.

Smarts was a challenger.

It will aid in troubleshooting and daily operations, and is invaluable in fault resolution.

We are a system integrator and DX Spectrum is one of the products that we implement for our clients. In conjunction with DX Infrastructure Manager (CA UIM) and DX APM, this gives our customers visibility into what is happening end-to-end in their applications.

Some of our customers are large banks and government agencies, and they are getting value from using it.

This product provides good visibility into applications at the backend.

Some of our customers like the Service Desk aspect of it.

IP conflicts cannot be resolved automatically in the case where an IP address changes. This is one of the capabilities that SolarWinds has.

There should be a facility to integrate with other monitoring applications that are currently running in the environment. For example, if a customer is already running SolarWinds then it would be helpful if integration between these two was easy to do.

I have been working with DX Spectrum for about 10 years.

In terms of stability, it depends on the environment. Sometimes, the application does not function well because of the type of security and policies that are in place. Certain policies will block the application, making it unstable. We learned this after some of our customers complained and we investigated to determine why.

When we come across a situation like this we start working with their security department to address the issues, and then everything will start working well.

Overall, I think that it's a really stable product.

The support for this product is not encouraging. When our customers have issues, there is a delay in response from the support team. This causes some of our customers to doubt the solution.

One of our customers was using SolarWinds, but have since switched to DX Spectrum because they were issues with it. Once they implemented DX Spectrum, they were able to determine the root cause of their problem and solve it.

The installation is straightforward. The length of time required for deployment depends on the environment. For example, in a financial institution, it takes between one and two months because we need to do some information gathering and have confidence that we are meeting the requirements.

There are times when we are mid-deployment and the customer will stop us to say that they want something new. In cases like this, it slows down the implementation phase.

Our in-house team handles the deployment for our customers.

One of the issues that we have is that our customers are not aware of the product's full capabilities and what it can do for them. We are running our own campaign to give our customers a better understanding of the benefit they can get from it.

In summary, I think that it's a fantastic and durable product. For me, it is nice and I am actively recommending it to my clients.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Actually, the whole network is monitored with this product.

It helps out the infrastructure team to be more proactive. We know about the problems at the moment when they occur.

It's very difficult to use and customize. In order to maintain the software, we need specialized help. The usability is an issue for us.

I have been using this solution since 2012.

We lost our database at the end of 2016, and we spent weeks trying to restore it.

There were no scalability issues, as such.

We don't use the CA technical support itself. Instead, we use the partner's support. The word that best describes it is insufficient.

I used another solution in another company, but in my current organization, the solution was already installed.

The great aspect about the CA Spectrum tool is not what it does, but the integration that it provides with the other CA monitoring tools, such as CA APM.

The setup was complex. The installation is complex with CA products. They involve a lot of steps and customizations.

I really don't recommend it for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

It is absolutely necessary to hire the installation service, along with the license.

Again, this solution is not for SMBs. Look at Gartner Magic Quadrant, as there are other options available that are more reliable.

However, if you have a complex scenario with lots of integration with other monitoring tools, namely IT service management (ITSM), project and portfolio management (PPM) etc., then this is the right one for you.

We evaluated other solutions, namely OpManager, Zabbix, Nagios, Ipswitch, and WhatsUp Gold.

There are many feature which are really good for business, and a few among them are

• Fault isolation which helps to control the unnecessary flood of alerts
• NCM (Network Configuration Manager) - To capture the configuration backup of the network, devices which have out of box features for Cisco devices
• Out of box integration with other CA products like Nimsoft(UIM), APM, eHealth to provide CA as a complete solution in the environment
• Integration with Service desk (ITSM) tool for ticket automation in an environment
• Integration with 3rd party tools as it can receive the traps and then can be converted into meaningful alarms.
• Ability to import MIB"s for different Vendor devices.

It has really helped to create a complete solution so that clients can see their whole IT network in one complete console/solution.

CA keeps on enhancing the product time to time, taking enhancements from users like us, as we make maximum use of their products.

I think they should improve or add advance performance reporting in the reporting part of Spectrum, they have recently replaced CABI with Jaspersoft in new version as a reporting integration.

I've used it for four years.

No issues with deployment for me as i have been deploying/upgrading this product frequently for different clients.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Great, we try to resolve issues of our own, but when required CA support is well versed in technical expertise and documentation to help their clients.

4.5 out of 5

No, I have been using CA products for almost 4 years now.

It's a bit complex on Linux box but straight forward for windows, but you need some hands-on experience to start on production.

In-house.

Read the documentation first before implementing, CA has a very well managed documentation and also good articles on their KB support site for known issues.

There are a number of features that make this product to standout from other competing products:

• Easy implementation with scalable architecture
• Seamless HA capabilities with no issues
• Integrations with other products including both north/south bound capabilities
• NCM - Network Configuration Manager for Device level configurations
• Expert CA support for the product.

In our environment, I have implemented CA Spectrum in HA. There is also Spectrum SOI integration for alert forwarding. We have created global collections to group the infrastructure with policies applied as per requirement. Also the SANM (Spectrum Alarm Notification Manager) has proven to be very useful for managing critical devices and immediate action to be taken with email notification etc.

The only area which I found that can be improved is that sometimes issues come up with alert clearing i.e. alerts don't clear when triggered and clear events occur too fast. CA should come up with ways where the alert is not valid, Spectrum should be able to re-verify and take action accordingly.

I have been using CA Spectrum for more than four years now. These four years include:

• Implementation of the solution in production environments
• Setting up of failover (High Availability)
• Integrations with other CA products like CA BOXI (for reporting), CA Service Desk (for ticketing), and CA SOI integration through connectors

No issues with deployment.

Never faced any issues with scalability. As the network infrastructure grows, to add new Spectrum servers is very straight forward with almost zero defects in existing architecture.

With expert CA Support, issues with the product can have a quick resolution so 4.5/5.

CA Spectrum is one of the products from CA which has great technical expertise to support it.

I have been working on Spectrum from day one but I have experience with other similar products. I found Spectrum as being a complete network management solution with a great user friendly GUI.

The best feature of this product is the simplicity of its architecture, which, once understood, makes the implementation very easy. I have never ever faced any issues with the initial setup.

I have implemented the complete initial setup myself. I have also done implementation with failover (High Availability) and integrations with other EMS products.

There are other similar products from IT majors IBM, and HP but we found Spectrum to be the most suitable for all of the major requirements of my organisation.

I would definitely recommend going ahead with the product. It will able to answer most of the network management related requirements of any organisation.