DX Spectrum Reviews

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.

• Works excellent for heterogeneous networks (lots of different vendors)
• Error correlation
• Root-cause analysis
• Service intelligence
• Lots of add-on products for Spectrum, e.g., VMware integration
• Local extensions/developments for special needs, e.g., new vendor xyz

With the object-oriented design of Spectrum, from its very first version, we had very important issues, such as fault isolation and root-cause analysis implemented by default!! Which means that we had through all these years very precise fault indications on where to look for the error and were not overwhelmed by long lists of alarm, which were only effects of the real fault.

So we then concentrated on building a virtual picture of the complete real IT infrastructure inside Spectrum. This includes today a very wide range of devices, which are modelled inside Spectrum and interconnected in the correct hierarchy as in the real environment. And, as the big buzzword today is IoT, this means for us as a service provider to our university users to deal with MoT = Monitoring of Things!!

The “new” things include devices such as coffee machines, fridges, temperature sensors, worktime badge systems, door opening scanners, house automation systems (for light, sun blinds, climate, etc.), smoke and fire detectors, etc. This list increases every year with new “things” popping up on our network radar!

Of course, the real IT devices like routers, switches, firewalls, servers, storage devices, WiFi access points, IP phones, and, importantly, printers, form the base of the big “virtual” Spectrum picture.

And last but not least, Spectrum by design can be expanded in its function by a series of add-ons, such as VMware integration, which reads out automatically the virtual servers in the vCenter and models all VM’s inside Spectrum in the corresponding physical servers. Another example of an add-on is the integration of a performance probe with scenarios that run periodically (i.e., log in to a webmail portal, check for the existance of a message xyz, lookup the calendar, etc.) and map those scenarios to objects within Spectrum, which can be handled like devices, so you can put thresholds on them and get alarmed when violated!

Thanks to Spectrum, we are able to monitor (and send out alarms for) our whole IT infrastructure 7/24 without having more than a minimal number of technical persons.

• Reporting
• Full web-based topology view
• Path view

I have used it since fall 1990. We’re a simple - but extremely long-term customer.

I only encountered stability issues in very rare situations; mainly when we used our own extensions for private management modules.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far!

Technical support is excellent - 9.5 on a scale 0-10 - but this also includes support from the local Spectrum partner here in Switzerland.

I did not previously use a different solution. At the time (fall 1990), there were only very few products available, where just two or three of them had a graphical visualization.

Initial setup was completely straightforward, as the product already included a discovery and an auto-connect function.

Start small and include as much of your IT infrastructure as possible, so that at the end you have a picture of the “big” total.

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.

It's a very mature product. It has a lot of features. It has fault root-cause analysis, so you can see a fault and know that those 10 or 50 additional faults are all related to that one. You don't get 50 messages. You just get one root cause.

It’s given us a faster response time. It’s been able to pick up things before end users call about them. It provides us with a lot of extra information about how the network health is.

In the latest release, they've added 64-bit performance. They've added several enhancements to integrate with other products. It's compatible with other products, and it gives us more information that way.

I would like to see more integrations with other products.

It’s been very stable for us. We don't experience many problems.

It's very scalable.

Support has been doing a good job. There have been no problems or issues.

Definitely consider Spectrum. It's one of the top solutions for its market space. It's not very hard to set up. It does a good job.

When selecting a vendor, we want something that’s been around awhile. It should be a mature stable product.

The feature that I find most valuable, but I don't see used often enough, is really applying the fault tolerance. In the last two companies I've worked with, they always categorized or contained different type of devices. There were routers in one box and firewalls and other switches elsewhere. They really shoot themselves in the foot because you need to be able to understand in the grand universe what's breaking down where and why. Where on the path is the issue occurring?

Even though this seems to become a very strong part of the application, it's not really being applied because people want to categorize and put everything into little boxes. They don't really understand global collections. That's where you would categorize devices by types or something of that nature. That's something I've been trying to promote in our own company to really get a better sense of a more organic view of the network. We can then see if the problem is with a server, a switch in between, a router, or a firewall. We want to know where along the path is the issue occurring.

We are using Spectrum as a conduit for other tools. For instance, we are bringing in SystemEDGE to send traps. We are going to use that to replace NSM, which is an old tool that is not supported by CA anymore. This is our replacement for auto-ticketing, and things of that nature.

When I joined the company a few years ago, they were looking for significant ways in which we could reduce incident tickets, severity tickets, with the different severities, to monitor the duration and improve repair time. With the implementation of the “shallow water” approach, we've been able to significantly cut down on the number and duration of outages and the number of severities in all the categories.

The biggest benefit is really getting away from Java, because of the way Java is a tool that needs to be updated all the time. We found a lot of issues with users not being able to log in because the Java version on their PC got updated and is no longer compatible with Spectrum. Getting away from Java was a nice touch. We'll be integrating UIM, and we're probably going to be putting PM into Spectrum, as well. We will be integrating all those into that particular tool. I like that aspect, as well.

They really need to work out some bugs. Getting away from Java is a good step. I'm looking to see how well we can integrate performance manager (PM) and UIM into that, and see how they all play together. I've got a distinct feeling that there's going to be difficulties that are beyond what they're advertising as to how nice and easy it's going to mesh them together. I think there's a lot of work that still needs to be done in that aspect.

I would like to see easier integration and implementation of device MIBs. I usually find that, whenever we go to add a new device, the MIBs haven't been certified yet. This is a painful process to get them working in order to find alerts, associate cost codes with event codes, and things of that nature. If they can make that process easier, that would be fantastic. That's probably the biggest challenge I found; when I'm dealing with event codes and making sure that they are processing things as necessary. We need them to understand what's coming from the end boxes that are throwing the traps.

Stability could be improved. I find on a regular basis that those of us on-call tend to usually have to go in and restart or reboot a Spectrum server because the landscape's gone down. Then we have to worry about rebuilding databases whenever there's patching. This has gotten better with the latest releases, but we've still got to resolve that issue. For quite a few years, we'd have to go and sit there and wait for patching to occur, so we can go and repair all the databases after the fact because Spectrum couldn't shut down the database fast enough before the reboot.

The stability is a lot better than eHealth. I noticed that eHealth was not being talked about a recent CA conference. I like the fact that they doubled the capacity, apparently, and they're going to be doubling that again pretty soon from what I heard. eHealth is obviously being put out to the pasture. I agree with that because it is old technology and needs to go away. This is why my company's actually looking at PM and that kind of stuff to replace it.

I like the scalability for sure. It's definitely helping out because we're growing in a huge way. We could go from 10,000 to 20,000 devices, and then that might even go up to 40,000 devices. This solution might be able to keep pace with the growth that we're seeing. As far as end-user equipment work setup goes, I don’t think it will be scalable.

I tend to be on call on a rotating basis, so whenever there are issues, I am one of the folks at the repair site on my weekend. I try to fix problems and issues. In terms of CA Tech Support, I'm sure I've got a reputation because I didn't really like it when they decided to push a lot of off-shore tech support on us. I really fought against that, and thought that it was not appropriate for the kind of contract that we had with them. I let them know that I don't care for how often they want to push professional services on us as a “fix it issue”.

I came to this company when the tool was already in place, but I was involved with the latest upgrade. I was not a lead engineer, but I offered support. I was involved with the project that upgraded all the tools.

CA knows about the difficulties with eHealth when going through the upgrade process. I pushed myself to look at my company’s other options because across the board, we're looking for some new implementations. I've been looking for eHealth replacements from other vendors even though our company is CA-centric. As an engineer, I can't really narrow the scope so that we only look at what CA gives us because that's really not to the benefit of the company.

I know CA might not like this but I would suggest looking at other vendors in the market and really see what the completion has to offer. CA has got a large footprint and that's fine, but as an engineer, you should always be looking for what's best for the company regardless of the vendor.