DX Spectrum Reviews

It is our network infrastructure monitoring tool.

The product’s stability and robustness are valuable. It is capable of efficient fault management irrespective of the size of the network.

The product should provide performance management features.

I have been using the solution for around 20 years.

I rate the tool’s stability a ten out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. In my region, five to ten customers are using the solution. We are a small market in Turkey.

The technical support is very mature. The team provides good implementation support.

The initial setup was straightforward. The time taken for deployment depends on the project and architecture. Simple projects take only a couple of days.

The product’s price depends on the deal we make with the vendor.

The solution releases new updates every quarter. It is easy to implement. It is the number one product in the market for complex and difficult-to-manage networks. It covers all our needs. The solution’s capabilities are far better than its competitors. Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

I use the solution for network discovery, performance monitoring, and integration with service desk platforms.

The benefit of Spectrum is its advanced connection capabilities and user-friendly interface, which engineers find easy to navigate.

The solution's most valuable feature is its web interface.

The solution's pricing could be better. Also, the customization of its web interface needs enhancement.

I have been using the solution for ten years.

The solution's stability needs improvement.

We have 30 solution users in our organization.

The solution's initial setup process is easy for Windows. However, it is complicated to deploy it for Linux. The process involves two modes, including standalone and distributed. It takes around two hours and requires one engineer for execution.

The solution's cost needs improvement.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

It is the perfect monitoring solution for customers' devices. Searching and locating of the reported device is very easy. The Discovery option is very great and fast solution to model a very huge network and also small networks.

It has improved our reaction time for incident management.

ITIL -

• Incident management
• Automation
• Connection between Spectrum and some standardized incident tools

Currently I have been working with this product for five years

Not really. Every tool has some strong and weak areas and they need to be tuned up from the beginning.For this we have the vendor support.

No, I don't think so. Every unstable state has been caused by an incorrect configuration, by overloading, or by hardware failure.

It is a network infrastructure management software for device monitoring. I didn't meet with issues regarding the scalability as everything could be set up or configured.

8/10 as I am well informed about any changes with the software or training as I am a technician.

7-8/10 but sometimes I think that technical support could be more flexible.

No, I didn't use a different solution. I just have some skills with other umbrella tools, where I was able to see a behaviour and processes which are needed for operation.

It's hard to say as every time it is a big challenge to implement any kind of the tool on our systems or improve them once in production. During the whole process we are faced with many more different situations. For this reason we have a testing environment. After the initial setup in the testing environment is complete, we are able to proceed onto the production process which is easier to do because because of the experience in the test environment.

Yes, the first time we have implemented it we used our vendors support, and I am rating the person as 10/10 as they performed an excellent job!

I see many advantages for using this software except if you need it as a home solution.

When I started many years ago with the Spectrum, we did an initial screen of the application with a picture of my ca, Means the customization is possible with many ways.

We are using DX Spectrum as a network management system.

The most valuable features have been the interface and the ability to do equipment management.

The solution could improve by allowing the ability to monitor the network shortly after installing the software and adding an auto-discovery function.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

When we have a high capacity of traffic, we have problems with the stability of the system. This could be improved on in the future.

The scalability of this solution is good enough for enterprise networks. However, for use in the telecommunications industry is does not scale enough. We can configure the systems correctly, but it is not enough for a telecommunication use case.

The support we have been receiving has been really good. They were about to answer all the questions we had.

The installation is straightforward.

The price of the solution is reasonable.

The most important area for us is stability and they need to improve on this for larger use cases.

I would recommend this solution for enterprise networks but not for the telecommunications industry.

I rate DX Spectrum an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is to monitor networks.

It is easy to understand and determine when and/or where the network is failing. 

All the features are working fine.

Make it easier to certify devices. 

I like the flexibility CA Spectrum offers to model networks with devices and different locations and technologies. 

It is easy to use and offers a lot out-of-the-box features (i.e. multi-vendor support, network discovery). 

If necessary there are also APIs to develop our own integrations.

Spectrum admins mostly enjoy having a powerful fault management platform which also lines up and integrates with the other software products they are using, i.e. trouble ticketing system and performance management solutions.

There is still room for improvement for mobile clients like tablets and smartphones. Most of the functionality can only be used with the Java client.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability. Especially with the latest release, the scalability was improved which allows support for huge networks with a small number of CA Spectrum servers.

Monitoring our network devices and our weighing devices out to our clients. It is an awesome product. It works really well.

It covers a lot of different types of hardware. It can do a lot and saves us time.

The breath of the product.

A better integration with the UIM, as far as being able to do root cause analysis and that type of analytics. 

They are separate products. There is some integration recently of the two, but not really at what I will say at the analytics level to tie the two, from one problem to the other. 

It is very stable. We have not had any major issues in over 10 years.

It scales really well.

I have not used technical support, but other people on my team have. I have not heard anything negative about the support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I would consider this at the top for doing this type of monitoring.

Sometimes it can be overly complex, but at the same time, it does give you a lot of capabilities. It is complex in just the varieties and the capabilities it has.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Combination of meeting the requirements and the cost.

It's easy to implement. I've used it for 15 years so I may be biased, but that's also a testament to how easy it is to use.

It's also very configurable. You can add features as you'd like. For example, you can easily add new alerts and watch lists. We can easily certify new devices and watch the behavior of these new devices out of the box.

You can add scripting and export results to an external database. It makes it easy to use and sort the information in a way that can be helpful to you. I could go on for a week about it.

Currently I'm happy they went to 64 bit, which has just finished. I haven't thought about other improvements; maybe better reporting. Currently, it's using BOXI/CABI, which is terrible as it’s unclear and I don’t like this.

I've used it for 15 years. We use Spectrum on the network infrastructure for five to six clients. We also sell it as an integrator to other clients as well.

It’s very, very stable which is the core benefit, and it’s also very easy to maintain. It doesn’t need much maintenance once it's set up. The strongest point of the product is it's stability.

Last year they didn't do a lot of development, and when they did it, it wasn’t secure enough. Each version took a long time to be stable, but it's gotten much better. Now it's totally stable, but 9 wasn't stable. 9.4.0 wasn’t stable, but 9.4.1 is. Overall, version 9 has been great.

It's quite scalable. You can easily set up a distributed environment with more than one central server. We currently have it scaled up to 5000 devices on one central server (high for Belgium), and once they release v10.1 it'll be even higher, I've heard.

We're very happy with the technical support. Once, I wasn't that happy, but now I've taken technical sessions with them and they've been helpful. Many technical engineers who are assigned to me actually know me to some degree, but this is for their product. Performance management wasn’t as good, and their service for this is superior.

Before we were using the HP solution, but then CA bought them. We like this vendor becuase of the strong network management system. So, what’s important to me is particularly the product more than the vendor. Vendors that integrate would be a nice plus. That’s the main reason we initially actually stayed with CA because the products can talk to each other, which has a good flow.

This is my job – to start form nothing and then help others set up. I also help others use it as well, so I scale it up for myself and others, and CA has been helpful.

Get an overall perspective. CA is helpful and you should be willing to talk to them.