DX Spectrum Reviews

We use it as a fault-management tool for our networking devices.

It's performed very well. We're still somewhat in the infancy. We've got a new deployment of Spectrum so we aren't 100% fully deployed with it. We have it integrated with CA Performance Center, which is what our initial experience is with, and we're just now bringing CA Spectrum into the fold.

The quick notification of issues, quick alerting because timeliness is always valuable, it's very important for us.

Again, that's a little tough because we aren't using it to it's full potential right now. We're hoping for greater visibility into our network, not just for us but for our customers as well.

It's been very stable and very easy to work with.

In terms of scalability, we've managed to discover just about all of our devices. We're still working with configuring, so for what we're using it for, which is very bare bones right now, basically just up-down, it scales fine. As we add additional capability to it, that may change, but I haven't seen that yet.

Support has been very good. They've answered all the questions that we've had. 

We've had issues that were a "severity-one" so they hopped on it immediately. For issues that have not been as urgent, they've been very timely in their response as well.

We were using CA Performance Center, and CA Spectrum is a logical extension of CA Performance Center. Between our management and CA themselves putting on the full-court press for sales, we decided to go that route.

It was somewhat complex, but that's also a little difficult to evaluate because we had a consultant that was the primary resource for the setup, and he had some challenges. I think if we had had a different resource it might have been more straightforward.

We did consider two other vendors. We considered SolarWinds, and I can't remember the other company but that company didn't last very long. It was somewhat close between CA and SolarWinds, but we decided to go with CA.

In the vendor selection process what is important to us are

• reputation
• reliability. 

It also helps if you have a current relationship, and we have a long-standing relationship with CA. That made it rather easy for us.

I give it a nine out of 10 so far but I have to qualify this answer. It's done everything that we need it to do. Again, until we do a deeper dive and explore it to its fullest potential, that could change.

Whoever you have do your deployment and implementation, make sure they know what they're doing.

• REST API: The single most undersold feature of CA Spectrum is the REST API!
• Customisation: Very customisable under the hood and using standard features.
• Reliable: It just works. I've been using Spectrum for more than five years and it just keeps getting better.

The REST API allowed us to automate a lot of the manual work required to add devices into Spectrum. This included:

• Installing the product via ‘silent installer’ based on one config file (installer would look at hostname and find out what role the server was and installed only those components. It also saves a DB if it’s a primary, and then loads the DB if it’s a secondary failover).
• Adding users from LDAP (you need to create the users in LDAP in spectrum, and then it uses LDAP after that).
• The automated deployment scripts we have first locally check if the devices are reachable via ICMP, SNMP, TFTP, etc., and then, if successful, it will add it to Spectrum in a specific container location. This contains logic which allows us to allocate which server in the Spectrum domain the device is deployed on and also checks to see if it exists on any other landscapes and deletes the devices that it’s not meant to be on only if the device exists on the correct landscape.

Other automation is the automatic creation of Global Collections, and a custom reporting ‘engine’ that allows us to query data from within Spectrum (e.g., 'Show me all alarms for devices running iOS version x which were created in the last hour' or 'Show me all devices which are running iOS versions not starting with 15.’).

Another thing that REST is good for is querying attributes for a specific model type. E.g., the VNM models contain info such as number of traps received, number of ignored traps, etc. When using tools like RRDTool, you can graph these over time and see how your Spectrum environment is doing.

These are the main areas and I’m looking to do a similar job for CA Performance Management. Once this is done, there is a lot of config management (i.e., management of Cisco configs) I want to do as even configs are stored in Spectrum models via attributes.

The best thing about Spectrum is the way it has been designed 'under the hood’. The concept of models with relationships to other models and each model having attributes. This makes a lot of information available that can be obtained very fast, instead of having to try do everything via VNM shell or GUI.

I was using VNM shell for years and typically ran scripts on each host and had to manage each host and the scripts (which were mostly always the same but nonetheless still a pain to administer). Most information is obtainable via VNMShell but you have to ‘stitch’ the info from each landscape together. With the REST API, it’s one call and it checks all landscapes.

What I also like about the REST API is that you can have a separate host running all the scripts. This allows for a much cleaner Spectrum build and less complications when upgrading.

Spectrum is what I like to call a good CMDB product. Once you have discovered the devices, you have a good CMDB to use to populate other tools. You can create custom attributes via the Model Type Editor and use Spectrum as your ‘single pane of glass’, which contains all the info a NOC/support team needs (e.g., you can import device reference numbers, circuit refs, addresses, contact numbers, etc.), so all the info is in one place. This can all be populated via REST API at discovery time.

It took me some time to get to understand the REST API and enjoy scripting, so the initial time investment was needed - but now it’s paying off and saving me a lot of time.

Back when I started to tinker with it, there was not a lot of documentation. This has vastly improved over the years and the APIs are getting better in terms of documentation and updated features.

The REST API work has allowed us to fully automate our deployment process, user creation, exception reporting, and much more.

The device support is very comprehensive and vendor agnostic. Device certifications are added almost quarterly or more frequently. This allows us to use Spectrum to manage new devices.

CA Spectrum is a good for network management (CMDB). While not a CMDB in it's own right, it is a good tool to use as the source of data for what is being monitored. Once Spectrum has the devices discovered, you get a lot of additional information such as software versions, serial numbers, interface info, module info, etc.

We also feed all of our alarms to it. You can feed traps/alarms from all over the place into Spectrum for that 'single pane of glass' functionality.

CABI was a major issue for us, but the newly added Jaspersoft is a better-suited reporting toolset, so this has already been addressed.

The OneClick UI is a little dated, but still very functional. They are also addressing this with the new web client. It's not quite where it can be, but it shows promise and looks pretty good for their first attempt at it.

One thing I would like to see is that all the IM products look similar in terms of UI design/widgets, etc. We are an MSP and would like our customers to have a seamless experience and not be able to notice moving between the various Infrastructure Management products.

I have used it since 1998, 17 years or so (since 5.0).

I have not encountered any deployment issues at all.

There was an issue with the REST API and a memory leak, but this was addressed very quickly and communicated via the CA Communities.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. Since 64-bit capability was added in Spectrum 10.x, we can add a lot more devices. However, we only populate up to about 60%, as we do quite a bit on the servers.

Customer service is very good. CA Support do a good job with communication and are always keen to assist. The CA Product team also continuously ask questions and look at the ideas posted on CA Communities. I don't think I've seen anything similar anywhere else. In most other cases, communities are run by users with little or no involvement by the vendor. CA are also always looking to include us with testing/new announcements.

I rate technical support very highly. Most of the tickets I've logged are API questions and these are answered fairly quickly, even though they are only P4's. I think I might have raised 2 or 3 Priority 1 cases in the 17 years I've been using it. It's a very robust product and has most certainly stood the test of time.

I've never had to switch from another product to CA Spectrum. Most places I have worked either already had Spectrum or I've recommended it/implemented it as a new tool.

The installation has always been simple. When I initially started using it, it was on Windows or Solaris. More recently, I've always suggested Linux. The move to Linux also didn't pose any issues and I've since done installations using custom scripts using the unassisted install. It just works!

Most implementations were done by myself but for some projects, we've used CA Professional Services and they are very professional. They usually have people with various skills (technical/management) and tap into their internal support structure very effectively (e.g., access to product managers/development team, etc.).

The automation we have in place saves us some head count and data is now more accurate. In some organisations I've worked before, we also used Spectrum as a sort of scaled-down ticket management system; that also saved time and the reporting we were able to generate was very good.

The other good thing about Spectrum is that it works out-of-the-box. You can run a discovery and once devices are added, you already begin to see value. The root-cause analysis is also one of the big pluses. I've used other tools from other vendors and I think CA Spectrum's root-cause analysis is the best one I've used across the most devices. The CA Spectrum team also keep adding more features and most of these don't come at any additional cost.

Additionally the API allows us to implement custom attributes so we can import data from a CMDB so NOC Operators, or other users can have all the information they need in one tool. Integration with other CA IM tools and Service Desk tools improves the workflows and saves a lot of time.

Work out exactly what you need and negotiate. CA are very flexible and are always happy to help. They are not very 'Big Brother' in terms of going over the license usage. They give you some play but expect you to be honest and report any additional licenses you use. E.g., if you go over 100 licenses, they don't mind that you go over but you need to let them know if you plan to continue using them. They don't necessarily want to do audits like other companies.

Renewals are also a good time to re-negotiate, especially if you plan to use more features or even other products in their portfolio.

I've used HP OpenView, Netcool, EMC Smarts and some others, and whilst specific products might have some 'better' or more-specific features that CA Spectrum might not have, CA Spectrum seemed to be the most vendor-agnostic solution and one that was pretty much ready to go, from install. It also seemed to provide a well-rounded set of features that didn't necessarily cover everything the others did but had essential capabilities and more advanced features too.

The CA Infrastructure tools on offer from CA work well with each other and are being more and more closely integrated every release. They use the Agile development methodology, so updates are frequent enough to keep up to date with new trends in technology. If you are not inclined to update too often, it is OK, as they do have a good support period. (I think it's 2-3 years or more in general, so you don't have to upgrade every time a new version is released.)

Invest in time and resources to utilise the REST APIs for their products; it will save a lot of time if you are an MSP or provider of any kind. Also, utilise your CA representative; they have a lot of experience with different industries (and technologies) and are valuable, fair and friendly.

We use this solution for monitoring the network device. We have to configure the alert management and integrate it with Zabbix.

It's a good tool. It's simple to do the configuration. It has good discovery and integration.

It would be helpful to have a business layer and the possibility to integrate with information like the location and business structure. It's difficult to analyze and configure. It's not a very smart tool. It's a little old, and there are other tools that are more efficient.

From my point of view, the problem isn't the single tool itself because Spectrum and Zabbix are vertical tools for specific devices. So, Spectrum is vertical on a network. The problem is to have a correlation with the infrastructure layer, network layer, and business layer. In my experience, the client wants to see the business service.

The business service works fine, but when there is a problem on the business layer – for example, the web service or CRM process flow – it's difficult to correlate the business issues with infrastructure issues.

Now there are many APM monitoring tools. We have the artificial intelligence to correlate different alerts, aggregate alerts and give them to the client as a head-to-end picture. The problem with Spectrum is they still require effort to create the report to extract the configuration. This is a big limitation.

I would suggest improving the web GUI to improve the device monitor configuration and to improve or to integrate the new tool for reporting. For example, it can be helpful to integrate with a tool like Grafana or another dashboard to have a layer for the reporting.

I have used this solution for one year.

It's stable.

It's scalable, but in the future, the client will want to replace this tool with a different solution.

We have an internal process. When the network team asks to deliver a new network device, they have accounts and administrator privileges to take charge of all the specs for the new network device. We have to manage and check the tool. We have to configure the new alert and the new integration with Zabbix. The discovery is generally managed directly from the network team.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

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.

Most valuable to us are the alerting capabilities and the topology information that Spectrum provides, as well as additional services such as device updates and the ability to launch them. These are typical network management services.

It provides us complete visibility into both company networks with one tool, which we didn't have.

I'm not familiar with all the current features and all its capabilities. I only know what it can do now. It suffices for what I need.

Spectrum already collects system information as SNMP data. What I additionally would like to see is utilization information. I only get alerts when the CPU reaches certain thresholds. I believe it does the same thing for links when links reach a certain threshold. I'm interested in statistical gathering. My primary job function is to determine why applications are slow, why customers experience latency, and related issues. I need to diagnose quickly whether its utilization, device failures, or if it's something beyond that. If so, that requires another tool altogether and I need to take a look whether Spectrum provides that type of information.

I haven't seen any problem. I'm a user, I'm not the administrator.

We will have to wait and see if Spectrum can handle both networks. Together both networks consist of about 6,000 to 6,500 network devices.

I have not used technical support.

Our company merged with another company, and since the merger, our company has outsourced all our LAN and WAN management. All our network tools have been at our vendors and we have had no access to them. Pre-merger, the second company did everything internally and used Spectrum as their network management platform. Now, with the integration of both networks, network management is coming in-house.

I recently attended a conference primarily to take a look at the CA Spectrum product and its capabilities regarding what advantages it's going to have when they bring in it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Riverbed Technology has a similar product that does network monitoring and gathers statistics. The classics, such as HPE OpenView and other similar products were considered.

Define what you need and talk to the various vendors. You don't need multiple platforms. The ideal situation is where you have a single platform and a single company that provides me with all the features and functions that I need. You need to have a very clear idea of what you are doing before getting into it.

Event Correlation and Topology features are by far CA Spectrum's strongest point. That means with its Topology, we can map out the architecture, and then with Event Suppression, if we lose an event upstream, all those downstream events that go through that path, they are suppressed.

We have removed all the duplicate tickets from our ticketing system. For example, if we have a store that is down, we get 20 tickets. Through CA Spectrum we are down to 1. So in the long term what we've done is less tickets, less people, more savings, etc.

With the latest release, the greatest benefit is the Checkpoint feature as we can now map and check for all the checkpoint connections. That's the biggest benefit to us.

Right now it's a Java-based application and we want everything moved to Web HTML5. The second big feature we want is log correlation. Currently, we can't do either of these features.

In my opinion, the stability is improving and getting better. Initially, we have had issues. Now, we are quite stable with the correct architecture.

It scales well. We have one of the largest implementations and it has done well.

The technical support is average. We've had better support from other companies and also worse support from other companies.

We didn't have any other solution before. We were using some supplemental products. We knew we were missing that managers tool. As we looked at other products, we decided to make sure we had the funding for this one.

We chose this product because of its scalability and also we had confidence in CA, which we didn't have in any of the other vendors.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor were scalability, stability and support.

I was part of the initial setup. We leveraged CA Professional Services to help. It is complex in a way that we have a large infrastructure and we wanted to map it out correctly from the start. If not, then you're going to have problems in the future.

We looked at other vendors, namely, EMC, SevOne, Riverbed, and HP.

I would advise others to design the correct architecture up front and that shall save you time in the future.

The logs are difficult to set up and we would like it in the HTML5 since Java is a very buggy product.

Auto discovery helps us reduce manual efforts. CA Spectrum automatically discovers all network Cis, including LANs, WANs and all the connected assets and creates the actual topology view.

Network configuration manager (NCM) help us configure capture. It helps detect unauthorized changes and delivers immediate notification.

Root-case analysis (RCA) helps us correlate the symptoms and probable causes for the events. It helps the MTTR and save engineers’ efforts.

CA Spectrum helps our organization improve network service levels. With the help of Spectrum’s integrated automated fault management & fault isolation features, it helped us reduce MTTR by 50% and costs as well.

Reporting and network bandwidth monitoring features needs to be improved. When we generate the outage report, the alarm title does not appear correctly in the reports. Also, sometimes events are not synchronized and are missing from the reports.

Spectrum needs to include historical reports for network LAN/WAN performance utilization and bandwidth utilization.

I have been using it for eight years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

I did not encounter any stability issues. Spectrum has built-in fault tolerance options that helps us build a high-availability setup.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Customer service is 10/10.

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used lots of tools, such as PRTG, IBM Tivoli, and SLMO. CA spectrum helped our organization automate fault management across multi-vendor and multi-technology infrastructure. Spectrum integration with service desk helped us reduce manual effort.

It was very easy to set up, install and configure Spectrum.

An in-house team implemented it.

Our ROI is 100%.

It's a very cost-effective tool.

It is a device-based license.

We evaluated SolarWinds NPM and Nagios before choosing this product.

It is helpful from the monitoring perspective and can be integrated with other tools, so that's what I find it good for.

This tool makes it more transparent to the customers. They can be alerted and be proactive based on the data we are getting.

They are looking at other CA products and I'm sure they are happy with Spectrum. We were looking at AXA (CA App Experience Analytics) and some of the tools you can integrate it with. In our company, we have Spectrum and SOI (CA Service Operations Insight) that we integrate with other tools. So, maybe they can combine the features into one product which can help.

It is stable. Our company has been using this for a long time. It does crash sometimes. We also encountered issues in regards to integration with some of the applications that are not using the latest version. So, there were issues.

It's good. I personally have not used technical support. We are premier partners and we've been talking to CA about a lot on these issues.

We have used no other solution prior to this one. We've been using the same thing for a long time.

I was not involved in the setup process. From what I have heard, it was straightforward. CA helped us to do the basic setup.

We have a good solution but it is not the complete solution for all the issues.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are quality and cost. We are happy from both perspectives.