DX Spectrum Reviews

A valuable feature is the topology view. You can view the topology. Other valuable features are the host configuration, the NCM feature, the policy manager that it has and the scalability. That's one of the biggest ones.

When I started working, we only had 35,000 devices in there. Because of the scalability and all that, we have over 100,000 in Spectrum right now. All of them are SNMP managed.

We have a DR site. We are testing the latest release right now. In our production, we have 9.3.3 and it's running good. With our requirements as they are expanding, for example, one of the issues that we have is the global collection, the real-time global collections. For example, let’s say, just the southwest region has 15,000 devices, and that group wants to have interface global collection; that's going to be over 300,000-400,000 interfaces, and they wanted real-time interfaces. That really bogs down the database, so we are looking at 10.1. In there, the scalability is going to improve a lot with that.

There are certain attributes that we would like to be able to send northbound to different applications or different API calls that we can use. That is one area for improvement.

Also, I would like to see a unified poller, which they have already talked about. If I have Performance Center in Spectrum, I don't need to have separate servers for those same applications. I could have one unified poller, which is getting the traps and also polling information.

I have been using it for two years.

It is a very stable solution. Once you launch it correctly, you barely have to manage it.

The level-one support is the same as the support you get everywhere with every vendor, but the layer two and above, they are very good.

I am not sure how they knew they needed to invest in a new solution, but when I got in, Spectrum was on the rise of being implemented. Before this, we had NetCool.

When I select a vendor, first, I look at the product; how viable it is. Second, I look at the support that I'm going to get from the vendor. Those are the two major things that I look for.

Initial setup complexity depends on how big your environment is. If you're doing a distributed setup, then you need little bit of architecture help on how it's going to be built, but on a scale from one to ten, with one being easy and ten being hard, initial setup is between six and seven.

My company, they looked at vendors before Spectrum, but now Spectrum is the primary vendor for fault management.

My rating reflects its scalability and reliability. There are some minor issues, but that can be resolved.

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 out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a nine out of ten. 

The tool's setup is simple. 

We have seen ROI since it saves time and money. 

DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable. 

DX Spectrum adapts to emerging technologies. It is an all-inclusive suite that includes performance. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

It's primarily a fault management tool.

An organization using DX Spectrum is more easily able to understand the root cause when something happens in its environment. The tool gives you the ability to correlate all the alarms from different devices and areas. You can pull the information together and you have a really good picture of what might have caused the problem, and what you can do to prevent it from happening the next time. That's a huge benefit. 

It also reduces the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot a problem.

The Global Collections are what I found to be most valuable. With the Global Collections, you're able to organize and categorize devices into "folders," or functional groups and categories, so that it doesn't matter which SpectroSERVER those devices are on.

In this tool, there's a distributed setup and you can have multiple SpectroSERVERs. Normally the devices that are on a SpectroSERVER are local to that SpectroSERVER. But with the OneClick Console and the Global Collections concept, you can take devices from any SpectroSERVER and put them in a group. You're then able to manage those devices from the Global Collections, which span across your SpectroSERVERs. That's one of the most valuable features of the tool because it allows for really efficient management of your devices, especially in a really large distributed environment.

Another really good feature is what's called SANM, the Spectrum Alarm Notification Manager. It allows you to produce notifications based on certain things that are happening. Each SANM notification runs as its own individual process. If one SANM notification stopped working for some reason, it wouldn't affect all the other ones. That's a really good feature as well.

One thing I would like to see improved is that it doesn't really allow for multi-tenancy. If you're an ISP or an MSP and you want to use this tool to provide these types of fault management services to your customers, you would need a separate SpectroSERVER for each customer, and probably a separate OneClick Console. You would almost need a separate instance of the tool running for each customer. Whereas other tools have multi-tenancy built-in, out-of-the-box, and you can stand up one instance of the tool. They should definitely try to change that to make it multi-tenancy-friendly because it's not at all.

They could also improve how events are managed and correlated in the system. They need to make event management and correlation something that works from a group perspective, versus having to go into all these files and manipulate certain portions of a file to effectively manage events. That should be something that comes through in an interface.

I started using DX Spectrum around 2007 or 2008. That's when I took my first Spectrum DX class. At that time, it was version 8.1.

My first time using it was as a consultant for a pretty large consulting company. I set the tool up for different organizations and businesses. That included installing the tool and discovering devices in that company's network, and then organizing those devices into Global Collections, organizing the maps. I also ensured that they were able to see all of the alarms on the OneClick Console, alarms that they needed to manage their devices effectively. I would also optimize all of the alarms and all of the company's data and resources so that they were not being overwhelmed with alarms.

It's a very stable and mature tool. It's been around for a long time and has gone through all the changes the industry has gone through. It's rock-solid. I don't recall any bugs that prevented the use of the product.

It's not easily scalable. To scale out, you have to install more SpectroSERVERs in the environment. That connects to the multi-tenancy topic. I wouldn't consider it the easiest product to scale out. That monolithic-type architecture is prevalent in legacy-type applications. That makes it difficult to scale, especially in today's environment.

It is used across multiple locations, departments, and teams. It really depends on how a client wants to deploy their SpectroSERVERs and where they want to put them. The environment depends on who is using the solution and how big their deployment is. But you could have hundreds of users in the system. I'm not even sure if there's a limit on that. Most companies did have a lot of users. They were pretty much all enterprise-level.

The tech support was really good. It depends on who you get, but most of the tech support people I worked with were pretty sharp and would help you resolve the problem pretty quickly.

Positive

I did use a performance and fault management tool, but that is a really old solution. It was a tool built by a consulting company called INS, going back to the early 2000s possibly.

Another tool I used was something called Infovista, which is a suite of tools, so it has more than just fault management. It was primarily for performance management.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. You have to know all the steps, obviously, but I can do it in my sleep now.

To install it and get it fully functional takes about a week. That sounds like a long time, but the optimization piece is what really takes the longest. To get it installed and have some of the basic, out-of-the-box stuff working would take a day or two days. The optimization piece could take anywhere from three or four days to two weeks, depending on what the customer wants to see. 

Clients would normally go with a OneClick Console and three primary SpectroSERVERs and then three backup SpectroSERVERs. Each of the primary and secondary pairs works in tandem. They communicate with each other.

Each SpectroSERVER pair can be thought of as a separate entity. Within each pair, they work together, such that the primary does the data collection, correlation, and polling. It sends its information over to the secondary and that's happening with each of the three pairs of SpectroSERVERs. 

The primaries are also sending your data over to the OneClick server. The latter has the ability to see all three of the devices and correlate things. The OneClick Console can be thought of as your web front-end, and then the SpectroSERVERs are like your database and polling layer. 

The number of SpectroSERVERs really depends on the size of the environment and what you want to monitor.

About 90 to 95 percent of my deployments were on-prem hardware servers. It then went to being on VMware virtualized boxes. Now, most of them are using cloud-based systems. The SpectroSERVERs are in the cloud.

Most of the companies using the solution have two, three, or four data centers with a SpectroSERVER pair in each data center. Or it might be set up with a primary SpectroSERVER in data center A, data center B, and data center C, but with the secondary for A in B, the secondary for B in C, and the secondary for C in A. That way, if a data center goes down, you still have some functionality for multiple SpectroSERVERs in different data centers.

Because SpectroSERVERs talk to devices, you want to keep them as close to the devices as possible, in that particular data center. You don't really want to do polling, monitoring, and management across wide area network connections. 

In terms of how departments manage the information, that's where Global Collections come in. You can make them either departmental or functional, et cetera.

In terms of maintenance, backups are done on a daily basis and that is something that has to be maintained. Replication between the SpectroSERVERs is something that needs to be maintained as well. There's a fair amount of maintenance that needs to be done on the product, but it's not to the point where you can't do anything else.

All our clients have definitely seen ROI. Although I haven't gotten specific information on that from customers, I would imagine that ROI comes because the time it takes to understand and resolve issues and get back to a fully functional state, is reduced significantly through the use of DX Spectrum.

I would definitely recommend it. With any tool, you want to do a proof of concept, but it's a great tool for fault management. Also, understand the caveats: that it's not the most scalable tool and it's not very multi-tenant friendly. Aside from that, it's rock-solid in terms of how it does fault management. That's something that you really can't beat.

In my mind, Spectrum DX was the number one fault management in the market for many years. Now, with everything moving back to the cloud, I don't know where it stands.

Spectrum is mainly for fault management. For performance management, we have a NetOps performance manager.

The fault management is perfect. You have alerts just in time.

The interface is user friendly.

I think the management or configuration of devices needs some improvement. 

The ability to add new device families from different vendors also not easy. It's a bit difficult.

I would like to see some historical performance of our devices added to Spectrum. That would be great.

It's a live solution, not for historical performance.

Reporting is also an area that could be better. The reporting tool they are using is called Jasper and it requires an official license to be able to work well. It would be helpful to have reporting included directly with Spectrum.

I have been using this solution for 12 years. I started with it when it was NetQS.

We are using the latest version of DX Spectrum.

It's very stable.

It's easy to scale. 

You can have multiple Spectrum servers and you can add them at any time.

We have contacted technical support with both the online support to CA and with Broadcom.

We have not faced a lot of issues with DX Spectrum. 

When we had one, we received very good technical support.

I was a vendor for CA before they were acquired by Broadcom.

The initial setup is very easy. 

After 10 minutes, you have a complete Spectrum up and running and you can start discovery immediately.

The deployment is very fast and straightforward.

I was doing a comparison between Spectrum and different vendors like Celeron, HP, IBM, and for me and a big entity, like a national bank of Egypt, and it was the best. It ranks as number one.

We have the DX Spectrum and DX NetOp for performance center management from Broadcom also. Actually, we have the full fledge from Broadcom and had it from Computer Associates before Broadcom started.

The distributed installation is on-premise, and we have one interface server and approximately six Spectrum servers.

I definitely recommend this product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It helps our NetOps group actually handle alarms in a way that lets them see the bigger picture of those alarms, and how they might affect our services. It helps us communicate information about the network state better to services that might be impacted by a specific network condition.

Spectrum allows us to have a holistic view of our network architecture. We have a pretty heterogeneous topology at U of M, we're a half Cisco, half Juniper shop, and we have multiple layers to our network topology. So, it's really important for us to be able to do that topological map, and be able to visualize the network state at any given time.

Spectrum is interesting because it's a super-mature product for CA, and it works really, really well the way it is. In terms of new features and functionality, I feel like there has to be a transition there. The Spectrum OneClick is a Java-based client, and that's aging. Really, before any new feature integration, I'd love to see a comprehensive rebuild of the UI.

It's pretty stable for us. We have, not a highly available implementation of Spectrum, but we have an active standby situation, where we have an active SpectroSERVER and a standby SpectroSERVER and an active OneClick and a standby OneClick running all the time. So it works out pretty well that way.

As the kind of enterprise that straddles the line between telco size and enterprise size, it scales for us, because we're not all the way at telco yet. Maybe one day.

Pretty good. They're super responsive. They have that four-tier system and that works pretty well, because if we have a question, we can ask it at a lower priority and it will still get answered. If we have something where our hair is on fire, they'll call us right away.

It could be a little bit better, to be honest. The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated, I think.

When selecting a vendor, the most important consideration is product; it has to be product and features.

I'd give it an eight out of 10 right now, because it does what we need it to do. It could go an extra 20 percent somewhere.

I have used Spectrum with four or five customers that are reasonably big. Some of them have an infrastructure that covers more than 30,000 desktops. 

If you are looking for the right monitoring tool, Spectrum is one of the best solutions. It covers networks very well. It has all the capabilities that you're looking for when it comes to monitoring. Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing. If you have a CA Service Desk, then it can be integrated so that if you have open tickets they can be closed automatically. The configuration manager is great as well. 

It's not a great performance management tool. Its reporting capabilities are not very good at all. 

I've used DX Spectrum for over 17 years.

It's a very stable product.

The scalability is there and architecture-wise it's simple. The interconnectivity is amazing.

CA Broadcom support is very bad—one of the worst. They are trying to improve a little, but right now, they don't even respond to a ticket for at least a couple of days. A customer is spending $100,000-200,000 on a product, and it takes them three days just to respond asking for the version number. And after the acquisition of Broadcom, it's only gotten worse. 

Setup is easy and pretty straightforward. If you have a simple architecture and everything is already together, it will only take a couple of hours. If you have an architecture that's more complex, then it takes only one day or two altogether.

In-house. The job generally requires at least two consultants for the implementation side. If it's a big customer you require at least two consultants to implement. For smaller and medium-sized customers, then one consultant is more than enough to implement this.

They are mostly on a perpetual license, but some of them are now moving to a subscription. 

If you are looking for better performance management, then you should supplement DX spectrum with another tool like CA Unified Infrastructure Management.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is to monitor all of our network infrastructure. Spectrum can monitor any type of infrastructure, but for us it's our network infrastructure. We also use it for configuration management. We have alarm/event management, network discovery, inventory, things of that nature.

One of the improvements is that we have a reliable inventory. Spectrum does such a great job of discovering our network that we have a high confidence in what our inventory is and because of that we're confident in the reporting we get. We can plan changes and replacement of end-of-life products in our environment very well because it's very accurate. It's very strong.

There are many valuable features but the ability to have all the inventory reports, event reports, configuration management. 

It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one. That's one of its strengths.

The only pain point I have is some issues with support and the timeliness of getting a resolution. Other than that, we're very pleased with the functionality. They're coming out with Spectrum 10.3 and I'm sure it'll have some additional functionality. For our environment there's not a pain point from a functionality perspective.

Stability is good. The tool is a complicated tool. It's got a lot of pieces to it, databases, and you have to treat it well. You can't just turn it off randomly. There are pieces to turning it off, methods. As long as you know that then it is stable. 

We rarely have any issues with it. You have to make sure you follow the process correctly to shut it down, bring it up.

I don't have a lot to compare it to but I wouldn't say it's overly delicate. 

We grow about 10% a year. We have about 5000, 6000 devices. Scalability is not an issue for us because Spectrum is 64-bit. The scalability is not a concern for our environment with this version of Spectrum.

Technical support is good. What I like about Spectrum is that they have a chat support. You can choose to open a regular case or you can try a chat support. It just depends on what your issue is. There are some things which are lower priority. 

We've had good success doing a chat support. It saves a lot of time. Usually you can get an answer pretty quickly. There are some cases where I've had a longer response because the issue is more complicated. 

Spectrum is a very wide product, the breadth of it, there's so many features and functionalities. I think it's a challenge for support, sometimes, because the person I may get assigned may not be as familiar with the feature I'm opening a case about. That would be maybe an area for improvements. I've worked with many different Spectrum support people. They may be real strong in one area but not so strong in another function of Spectrum. That's a challenge.

There are some cases where they may have to reach out to development to further diagnose your issue. That's where we do lose some time with support cases. Most of the cases are not severity-2 or severity-1 cases. Most of my cases are lower priority but it may be an issue that's a bug and it may take a little more effort to find out.

You have to adjust your expectations. If you come to Spectrum with a lower priority issue, depending on what happens, that may take a month, or it could be longer, to work through, recreate it. That could be a downside. I think you have to adjust your expectations to some of the support. I think there might be some room for improvement there because, when they have to reach out to development, that really slows things down.

Many enterprises have something called "tool sprawl." Over time you invest in tools and all of a sudden you step back and realize there is some overlap in the tool set that you have. You have tool X and tool Y and they each do some different things but then they do some of the same things as well. You realize you have some overlap.

We had a maintenance contract come to term. We paused and listed all of our tools and listed their functionality and made a matrix, then added to that what we wanted to look for in the future. Then we stepped back and we evaluated different vendors, and CA was one of those vendors. We looked at their offerings and from that process we decided to go with a CA suite of infrastructure management tools.

We used CA Professional Services. I was along with them. I would say it's a little on the complex side. 

The initial install, there's a little bit of complexity to it because you're dealing with operating systems. You have to make sure all the prerequisites are done, anti-virus exceptions, etc. You have to have a service account. Then there's the bringing it up and then there's discovery of the network and setting that up. It takes time. It's not like where you set it up, here you go, hand it over. No. 

You can hand over a bare-bones install but after that you have to import your network, make sure it's modeled correctly, make sure all the dependencies are mapped. Once it's installed that's just step one. Then setting it up to get to a steady state, that's step two. Then there are other items.

Our consultant was four months on-site doing Spectrum setup and working through issues. Sometimes there are bugs and the consultants have to reach out to support, themselves, and work through things. It's a very sophisticated tool, it's a very powerful tool. It's vendor agnostic. It doesn't matter what kind of infrastructure you have. They give you the capabilities to do many, many things. 

It's more on the complex side. It's not like some tools come with a bunch of out-of-the-box reports and things like that. Spectrum is not like that in terms of a lot of out-of-the-box things. They give you the functionality to get what you need, but you have to spend time to set it up. 

Riverbed was one of the other vendors we looked at. Part of the reason CA was attractive is, we did have them come out and set up a demo and a look through. We went through a checklist of what was important to us to evaluate.

The other vendor, we did not have them out. We did some demos with them; we already had some products from them. Honestly, we had a difficult time getting quoting and renewal for what we had. That was part of the reason. We did like the functionality that we saw from the CA. It didn't help that we couldn't get a good, invested communication from the other company that we did have products from.

I think you have to be aware of what steps you follow when you shut it down and bring it back up. You have to make sure you check that you are getting current alerts when it comes back on. Make sure that you did not lose any functionality, because there are a few pieces of it that are running simultaneously. You have to make sure all those pieces are running, operationally. There have been a few times where I started it back up and the alarms weren't coming in and I had to go check that. You just have to be careful to check the pieces.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include:

• the cost of solution can be prohibitive, of course
• the functionality 
• how long the company has been around is a factor, obviously.

I give Spectrum an eight out of 10, just because of the issues with technical support.

I would make sure you grapple with the amount of time that it would take to use the solution and invest in the solution, to get what you need out of it. It's a powerful solution. It does take a skill set and time to set it up properly. It can do what you need it to do. You just have to spend the time to configure it. It's very customizable, which means you have to have a person that has the time to spend to customize it and get the data, get the reporting, events, alarms out of it.

There are some products that have all the intelligence built in but they're not as customizable. Some companies may like that. Spectrum, I would say, is not like that. Spectrum has all the functions there, but it takes a team of people to get that value out of it. CA does Professional Services engagements and they have guys that are subject matter experts that can go in and create all that value from the tools.

I think you have to make sure you understand, for the long-term, the skills of the team and what training may be necessary to get them up to speed. 

If you have a tool set like Spectrum that already is similar in the complexity, you may not have as much ramp-up time to get value out of it. If you have a tool like CiscoWorks, it does a lot automatically for you. That's not the same case with the CA. It takes some investment and setup and configuration to get those nice reports you're looking for. It's powerful because you can customize any type of report but it takes some skill and time to do that.

• Network Configuration Manager
• MPLS & VPN Manager
• Southbound Gateway
• Event Rules
• Event Procedures

By using event rules and procedures, we got an improved event management process. CA Spectrum is very useful for event handling and brings us a robust “manager of managers” console.

SpectroSERVER fault tolerance (FT) functionality: The OneClick console should have a native HA or FT functionality. Actually, the only way to get this is by using a load balancer.

SpectroSERVER is the core component in CA Spectrum architecture which polls devices into the network. You can use multiple servers to build some kind of "cluster" to provide continued device polling when some server fails. A OneClick console (web server) is front-end of CA Spectrum, and it does not have an option to provide continued user access when a OneClick server fails (High Availability). You can use a Load Balancer, but is very expensive.

We have been using this solution for seven years.

SpectroSERVER and reporting databases can grow quickly. If you don't take care of trap storms, this can cause SpectroSERVER crashes and performance issues in the reporting.

No scalability issues were encountered.

Customer service is very good. I would give them a rating of 10 out of 10.

The North America technical support team is excellent, 10 out of 10.

The LATAM support team has some things to improve, six out of 10.

The initial setup was complex because it requires a deep knowledge about tool architecture and proprietary software. In some cases, if you make a mistake during the installation or the initial setup, the better solution is to reinstall or reinitialize some DB.

We implemented the solution through a vendor team. Their level of expertise was high, nine out of 10.

Licensing is usually expensive, but cost efficient.

We evaluated IBM Tivoli Monitoring.

I recommend the use of CA Spectrum mainly to monitor network infrastructure. Use this tool like a “manager of managers”. Event monitoring is a very powerful functionality.

If you want to monitor servers, apps, and databases, then use CA UIM probes.