DX Spectrum Reviews

Root cause analysis, fault isolation, customizations, and CA support tech access.

It decreased our downtime.

Interop between server/agent based monitoring (UIM).

We have been using this since the early 90s.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Technical support is the best in class.

We used many, including HPOW, NetView, and Nagios.

The initial setup was straightforward to install. Then it’s a rather big leap between basic usage and pro-usage. Spectrum is VERY tech advanced in its core, compared with other tools on the market. But that doesn’t show up until you do a more advanced type of monitoring.

Maintain a good relationship with CA.

My role does include a continuous monitoring of other products on the market, but none are near Spectrum’s root cause engine, which really is what it is all about.

Try to see through other product’s GUIs and focus on backend core features. How does the product isolate faults? Do different modules have to work together to triage root cause?

The most valuable feature is that after setup, using it is very straightforward. Configuration was very simple, and the technical support was also good.

The greatest benefit is the kind of alerts that we get. We can do root cause analysis to correlate events. Instead of getting 100 emails when the core is down we get an alert.

I would say integration between performance monitoring and CA Spectrum, as well as improved graphing capabilities.

We have not had any issues with stability.

I think the scalability is good. Right now, we have about 1,000 devices. The good part about Spectrum is that you don't have to worry when you want to expand.

Technical support is very good.

Previously, we were using open-source solutions.

With the help of the support and the documentation, setup was straightforward.

We also evaluated SolarWinds before going with CA Spectrum.

Stability and support are important to us. We want to have the confidence that the vendor is investing in their product.

It provides several valuable features, including Spectrum Core, Report Manager, and VM Manager.

Our team has been able to maintain over 99% availability across the enterprise. 

We've also been able to proactively detect four major client-impacting outages over the past nine months.

I would like to see improvement in the ability of the user to configure the maintenance mode more efficiently.

We haven't had issues with deployment.

We haven't had issues with stability.

We haven't had issues with scalability.

It is an excellent product. It is probably one of the best we have seen in terms of being able to do mass configurations in the network.

Timing is always important when a network loses connectivity. It has allowed minimal downtime with the ease of being able to quickly isolate and resolve any outages.

I really can't say there are any at this time. We are happy with the product.

We have used this product for seven years. We were looking for a tool that could both monitor and provide additional tools for configuration updates.

Deployment was not an issue. Support was fairly good.

There have been few issues with stability and overall it's very stable and effective.

We are not a large corporation. Yet the product was able to scale very well.

The customer service was quick in response and thorough. No complaints.

9/10.

No previous solution used.

Creating the infrastructure did not prove extremely difficult. It was organized and detailed. It fully represented out network on all levels.

Definitely recommend it. It's a good investment.

The ability to monitor your WAN and LAN infrastructure in a simple GUI.

We keep this product up and monitoring 24x7 for fast and simple availability.

Really unsure of any, quite pleased with product.

Going on two years.

There are a very few occasions when the system "barfs" and it looks like your infrastructure has gone dark, but it bounces back quickly (the system).

None so far. We are one of the largest networks in America and it hasn't so far.

8/10.

9/10.

I believe it was done in-house.

Not sure of the exact number, but our clients charge $50,000 a minute so every second counts.

This is a good product, just be sure to train the ones who are setting it up because this is based on manual data entry and/or SNMP.

Alarm Monitoring

It was used as a tool to observe critical alarms on network nodes and act immediately.

The tool fails to launch sometimes, and this was a frequent occurrence.

Seven months.

No issues encountered.

Latency in access at times.

Never attempted scaling.

6/10.

7/10.

No I haven't.

Straightforward setup.

We used a vendor team.

Not many others.

We also use CA eHealth tool.

I used to use it for the server but switched to Nimsoft because it's much better for servers.

It's deployment tool is horrible.

2 years

Yes, there are issues - detecting servers is impossible.

We've had stability issues with the database and clients not working.

Not that I've experienced.

7 out of 10

7 out of 10

We used an external vendor team.

I switched from Spectrum to Nimsoft because it's a better product for me. The network admin still uses Spectrum.

The most valuable features start with the core feature fault management and then the Configuration Manager; Service Manager; Watches; event management and event correlation; MIB tools; and the fact that it is fully customizable.

CA Spectrum as a fault management tool from a service provider perspective, turns your network management team from reactive to proactive, minimizes the network management staff number requisite, and gives you a centralized view of all your network faults. From a customer perspective, it assures you about your network health and availability. The configuration management feature relieves you the burden of manually saving all yours devices configurations. It allows you to massively upload standard configurations to a group or to all your network devices. The service manager feature allows you to look at your network devices as a collection of assets that plays a role on a service instead of looking at them as an individual network asset. I could give you much more examples.

There's always room for improvement! In order of importance, I would say that CA should start to get rid of Java on the OneClick console. They could highly improve the Configuration Management feature, the schedule manager and the watch's allowed types and formulas.

I have used CA Spectrum for eight years.

The most stable version I've worked with was the 8.1 and the 9.1.3 running on Windows Server 2003. Every versions running on Windows Server 2008 (R2) that I've worked after that (versions 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4) have had some issues either with OneClick/Spectro Server communication (hanged alarms for instance) or with global loss of SNMP communication with network devices, or DDMdb increasing indefinitely or with some unexplainable SSDB crashes. I haven't worked yet with version 9.10 but I am pretty sure that the 64-bit architecture was a huge improvement for the platform performance.

The DSS (Distributed SpectroServer) deployment is quite good for scalability. The only issue with it is when you need to discover connections between devices that stand in different SpectroServers (different pollers). You cannot find relations between them at all! The only workaround I know is to duplicate the devices that are doing the bridge between whatever you have in one poller and the other poller in both pollers!

Although they behave differently depending on the zone you are in (US, Europe or West Asia), for basic and common issues they are good. For more advanced (models database issues for instance) or specific issues (monitoring interfaces running HSRP for example), they will struggle with it and most likely won't be able to give you a solution! If you want to fully explore the features of the platform, you will need to dig it by your own. One curiosity detail about CA regarding CA Spectrum is that as they released new versions of CA Spectrum, they start to hide the deepest features, such as the creation of different model types in the catalog database. You can still do it but, if you want documentation of it, you need to go to look for it at Aprisma and/or Concord documentation (these are the previous vendors of CA Spectrum). If you start with customization issues, even if they are well documented in the manuals, the support will most likely advice you to contact the CA Special Services and close your issue.

I didn't use a previous solution. I've always worked with CA Spectrum.

Depending on the operating system, you may need more or less pre-install tasks (installation user privileges, hosts file configuration, then in Linux you need specific packages, disable or configure IP tables, or in Windows disable UAC, DEP, firewall, etc.). The platform installation is straightforward. Always use dedicated servers for CA Spectrum and if you have the chance to, install the platform in virtual machines making snapshots at important checkpoints. It will spare you a lot of work and troubles.

In my former company we had a per device licensing. I'm not aware of the values.

I've been working with CA Spectrum since my first work day. I was never in a position where I could take that kind of decision.

Try to test and tune every feature you want to implement in a controlled environment. CA Spectrum is a powerful solution that will allow you to do almost everything you ever needed to monitor your network infrastructure. Due to its many features, there are always multiple ways of achieving the same goal. Picking the most efficient is the hard task. For every monitoring/management challenges that you face, you have always the last resort alternative, which is using your own scripts/programs to interact with CA Spectrum Web Service, VNMSH, or even adventure yourself (re)writing Java code using the CORBA API.