DX Spectrum Reviews

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.

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.

For me, as a deployment person and support person for the product, the most valuable feature is the scalability of the product. We started out with a fairly ambitious goal of managing about ten thousand devices. That over a couple of years became about one hundred thousand devices. Without completely crashing our original architecture, we were able to scale up to meet that requirement rather easily by just horizontally adding more servers.

It met a really critical need inside of my company because just before I was hired, they had about a two-day outage in one of their data centers. They didn't really understand the scope of the outage because they lacked in their existing monitoring environment the ability to see the topology of the network. They thought they were fixing the problem over here for a couple of days until they finally realized, oops, they probably really made it worse. So that is one of the key things that Spectrum brings to the table, that ability to do vault isolation, and alarm suppression, and more quickly find and focus on the area that needs to be fixed.

A big problem for us now is the Java requirement for the console. It really should be using HTML5. Our personnel use a multitude of enterprise and network management tools, each of them with different Java requirements. They, as cleverly as they can, have devised a means of trying to make those things sort of work and play nicely together on their glass. But it's an issue. Every time we do an upgrade, the Java version changes for Spectrum.

The new web client is a fairly basic sort of operator-level solution at this point, but it's going to expand into a full-blown one at some point. One of the questions that I'll have for product manager is, what's the timeline for replacing Java?

From time to time we have issues with Spectrum. When we do, they are generally easy to recover from. I am very impressed with the stability of this product. I've been doing network management tools a long time and I know of what I speak.

In Spectrum, the concept is really two tiered. It's a solution with a web client application. Initially, we had nine servers doing the polling and, I think, two one-click servers serving the buoy. Then management came to us and said we need to do a whole other part of the enterprise, so add another nine servers. We just quickly added them and pointed them to the devices and the main location server, which is the one that ties all of the polars together. As more users were added, we just added more one-click servers.

I think we are one of the larger Spectrum deployments in the western hemisphere. There are some things we would like to request for product enhancements in terms of supporting a horizontally-scaled set of one-click servers.

I was very excited to see the presentation yesterday that told us where they think the product is, where it's going, and we are going to hear more of that today with the roadmap presentation. Things are looking very good.

It has been very, very good. We sometimes have to more carefully explain our problem to the person that is assigned to us. But once we get that fully understood, we quickly get the right focus. I have been very impressed a number of times with the quality of the person on the other end of the phone. They've actually helped us with some things beyond the actual current problem when they've taken a look at our system and said, oh by the way, do this or do that. It has been very good.

Installations went smoothly. Customizations were pretty straightforward.

If you like to sleep at night and not be disturbed on the weekends, get Spectrum. It's a really robust, mature product, but still with newer and newer features being added, and it's very, very stable.

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.

What I like about the latest that they came out with is that 10.2 looks like it's going to be better, and they added a web console. I like the HTML5 fact of it, because it's a lot easier for me to get to my admins and other elements like that so they can look at their own stuff without having to sift through a bunch of stuff. I really like the web console addition, and from what I see from the 10.2, the whole thing is going to be HTML5. I really think that that's going to be real beneficial as far as me getting people convinced to use it and to actually look at it, instead of coming to me all the time for help.

It helped, basically, because we are working on root cause analysis. If we were to have outages, we really didn't know what the problem was, we just knew we had a server down. With Spectrum, we can do a root cause analysis by building topologies and we can actually tell you what port went bad on what device. Instead of just knowing that the device went down, we can know why it went down and exactly what happened.

If 10.2 goes completely to HTML5, I think that's going to be awesome. Just give everybody a website and tell them to log in and it'll be single-sign-on login, too, so they don't even have to remember another password. There is value in that alone, just trying to get people to log in and use it themselves, see it, and monitor it. They can monitor their own stuff and if something is wrong, I can do the tweaking, but at least they could see what's going on. I don't have to sit there and look at a dashboard and call everybody up and say, "Hey, your server's got an alert" because they don't want to mess with the Java console. They don't want to install whatever they have to, in order to do it themselves. I don't know, I call it laziness, but they're busy too. If it could fix it itself, that would be great! I think the way they're headed now with the roadmap and the visions that I saw. I really think that any improvements that they're going to make will be made in this next release. Basically, what I'm seeing right now, I think the improvements are happening..

We haven't really had any stability issues with it, now that they've actually did some more upgrades. The biggest problem we had with it at the beginning was just the Java console. You had to have an older version of Java and then you had to go in and actually set the library up in the Java for another one. You had to make a lot of changes and a lot of people didn't want to go through that. That is the reason why I really like the web console on it now because you can get away with not having to install the Java console. If you have to add three more steps to a process, they just don't want to use it.

I have used technical support and they are very good. I've never had a problem. Usually I'll open up a case and I'll hear something back from them the same day. They're very knowledgeable with their products and very helpful, too. If I just don't have time to research something and I need it fixed, I just tell them "I need this fixed" and I never have an issue. They take care of it. They'll even connect remotely and do it themselves sometimes.

Be patient. In its current state, I would have a representative from whoever your partner is help you with it. From what I can see, when we implemented UI, it took 2 weeks of on-site representation from our partner to help get it up and running. I think it's something that it would be less painful if you did have somebody that knew what they were doing, one of your partners or something, come and help you install it and get it installed. Then after that, start running with it. Do not do it by yourself.

I choose a vendor based on their knowledge of the product. I need them to be able to tell me what I need to know and where I can go to get information. Don't try to sell me something and then tell me you don't know how to use it. I've had that happen with some stuff. For example, by saying something like, "I'm new at this". I need the knowledge. That's what I want from you to help me to succeed, because we pay good money for this stuff. We have MSOs and everything we pay for yearly, and I really do use it. I don't have time to sit there and always research something and read something, so if I call you with an issue, I really hope you know what I'm talking about and you can help me fix it.

We actually service providers for CA Spectrum. If we create a solution for a customer with this type of API, we use CA Spectrum to monitor this API.

I have found the cross-analysis feature to be the most valuable. The many alerts you get have an impact on the connectivity, so you need a very good correlation for layer 1, layer 2, layer 3, and layer 4, layered at the understanding of the technology, which locates the spectrum. It's really unique in this type of solution.

We have been using CA Spectrum for over 15 years, I think.

The stability is very good - the best we've seen in the market.

It is very scalable. We scale to up to 50,000 devices or so. That's the sizing we usually pulse. And we haven't had any issues so far.

We thought that because we are not beginners anymore, we have very high expertise ourselves, so we usually take a second-class support approach or we fix it ourselves. But when it's more complex, it takes a little bit more time.

For us, the implementation was quite complex but it's because of the large number of different environments we're dealing with. So it's not the tool, it's the domain expertise. We need optimized implementation.

Time for deployment really depends on the size of the domain. It can be done in half a day, or it can take you up to eight months or even longer. So it depends on the domain complexity. And then it's not building an application itself; you have to design first, and that is the biggest chunk. It costs you eight percent. So if the design is done properly, then the building is already configurated. There are still a lot of app ports that can be done to help us out.

We going more for a solidified network so we need some improvement there, based on the current level of support for our network. And a more detailed integration with NetFlow data is important for us as well. I also feel that the CIS lock-based correlation needs to be developed as well. So on a scale from one to 10, I will rate CA Spectrum an eight.

Spectrum is a network report and configuration monitoring tool.

This is a very powerful tool with a lot of functionality. Once you have completed the training and have some experience using it, it's a very useful and powerful tool. 

We're trying to replace this solution with another product because it's too expensive and not very user-friendly; it requires training and takes some time to learn how to use it. 

I've been using this solution for 13 years. 

The solution is stable. 

We're a large enterprise user so the solution is scalable.

The technical support is very good. 

You must have the training that Broadcom provides as it allows you to make better use of the functionality of this tool. The solution is geared towards larger corporations and global companies and I rate it nine out of 10.