DX Spectrum Reviews

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.

We monitor our network devices with it, therefore it performs well.

The flexibility. It is so customizable. You can about make it do anything you want it to do, if you can figure out how to make it do it. There are things you can do in it to customize it to your environment and make it meet your business needs. I do not know if I have seen other products in this space that are as flexible.

We see events that we would not typically see. Thus, it helps us find things that we may not have known were wrong. It creates transparency and makes everything work by being more transparent.

CA is going in the right direction. What we want is more integration between the tools and it looks like they are doing more of that. That is probably the big thing. Better integration between the tools, being able to take all the data from the tools and having it available in one place, such as generate dashboards, analytical data, etc. 

I would like to see CA move Spectrum, Performance Manager, and some of their other tools moved to a SaaS based model. You see a lot of other manufacturers which are moving toward SaaS based models.

The stability is good. We have not issues in the two years that we have been using it. It is one of CA's more stable products.

The scalability is good. We have not scaled it a lot. We are getting ready to add another SpectroSERVER to it for redundancy. But from a scale perspective, it has worked out okay for us.

Technical support is so-so. It depends on who you get. Sometimes you get the runaround. Sometimes, I am not sure that the people that pick up cases know the product well.

You open a case specifically for Spectrum support, but depending on who you get, some of the guys are really good or knowledgeable. Typically what you find out is those are kind of the higher level people. Then, sometimes you get people that you do not get really good answers from, who make you feel like you know more about the product than they do. So, it is hit or miss. 

Sometimes, you have cases that may stay open for weeks. These are not complex cases. These are just questions about how to do something or if you can do a certain thing. It seems like it takes a long time to get an answer. It just depends.

The communities are probably a bigger help than actual technical support because you have a lot of other people that can provide feedback. Therefore, it is not terrible.

It was pretty straightforward. We actually had the CA Services guys come in and help us set it up. 

We were involved in the the set up and everything, but CA Services did the heavy lifting. They were the experts, so we did not have to have a ton of knowledge. So, the setup for us was pretty easy because we used CA Services.

We had HPE OpenView, SolarWinds, and OPNET tools. We chose CA because we can consolidate all of those tools down. This is why the integration is important. It has allowed us to eliminate a whole bunch of other tools, so we were able to consolidate, and that was a good thing for us.

It is a really good product, though it is very complicated. You need to make sure that you have the staffing, because of the complexity of the product. You will need staff to be able to use it to its fullest extent. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

The biggest criteria are:

• Functions
• Features
• Cost
• The reputation of the vendor.

There are a lot of little vendors out there that are in a lot of these spaces, but you have never heard of them. Therefore, it is good to have a large company that you know and you trust. We have a good account team and good pre-sales people. They have really help us out a lot.

It makes sure that the company network is doing what it's supposed to do.

The way our network is structured, CA Spectrum seems to be able to deal with problems that we have coming up in real time. There are parts of the product we are still not using yet because we are still kind of green, so I know there is more that it can do; but right now it's the fault management side of things.

I am not sure I can address areas with room for improvement because right now, it is doing everything we need.

See my tech support comments below.

It's pretty stable for a Windows product.

It scales pretty well especially with the new 10.1. We are actually going to be able to consolidate and shut down some of the servers just because they've increased capacity.

I used to do support for Spectrum, so I know it really well. Sometimes the front-line people need to push it up to the second-level quicker. But because I know people on the inside, I can usually get it moved up when I need to.

I don't believe they were using anything prior to this. I think it was on an "on-call, this-is-down" basis.

Definitely demo it. Have them PoC it for you. Once they show you what it can do, it can really make a person's decision a lot easier.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor is definitely supportability. Obviously, it needs to do what we need it to do. If it didn't, we wouldn't have picked them to begin with; but for me, it's supportability.

With Spectrum, you have a complete insight into your entire infrastructure. You can look at your network system applications and pinpoint issues and problems for analysis. It's one of the premiere products that are out there.

It's beneficial because we can actually look at alarms and events. We can control those alarms and events, and provide them to our towers or silos. Also support -- it's an essential depository for traps, SSMP, network systems, and applications.

The OneClick MIB tools are a little complex, and I've seen other MIB tools that are a little simpler. I'm used to it, but I know if somebody's not familiar with it, it can be a little bit challenging. But overall, I have experience with it so I know what works and what doesn't work.

The stability of Spectrum is fine. We're just waiting on a new release to be put into play. We're excited about that because we're in 64-bit architecture, and the new release will be more stable and feature-rich. So, I'm really excited about delivering that to our program business unit’s infrastructure.

We can distribute it as far as we wish. I have no issues with Spectrum's scalability. I've seen it in multiple locations, including ours, where it's very stable.

9/10

I wasn't involved in any of the implementations that were put in there. I became the new caretaker in some ways, a shared investor in this solution.

I don't think you're going to go wrong with Spectrum. It's going to provide all of your needs and if you have to customize something in Spectrum, it's a customizable SMI, so it's very straight forward. You bring in all your events and you can integrate it with various other solutions.

Our use cases for the solution are configuration backup, performance monitoring and presentations for the upper management. I'm an assistant admin and we are customers of DX Spectrum. 

The presentation layer is pretty simple and straightforward and the dashboard is pretty easy to read.

The visual is good but it's a little archaic. I think it's the way it's compiled, because I've been struggling recently with deploying it in different departments. The software still uses a 32 bit library on the Linux boxes for installation. Every admin scratches their head when I ask them to install, 16 or 17 packages, 32 bit packages on a 64 bit architecture.

Also, they dumped all the documentation from the old versions and re-tagged them with the new version and they haven't updated them for a few years. That's a bit of a problem. They need to get rid of Java and 32 bit applications proctors, and that would be good.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The stability isn't bad. There are Java issues but that could be because of our setup so I wouldn't blame the software. Although again, using Java is a little outdated. 

The solution can be scaled to an unlimited amount. We have 50 users, usually admins and managers.

I don't have much to compare it to but something that stands out is probably the ease of dealing with tech support. It's one of the better relationships that I've had with tech support. They always respond and they're on time.

The setup isn't complex it's just not up to date. It's 2021, why would anybody use a 32 bit package for an application. 

You need to make sure the product runs in your environment because it might not be compatible with some people's setup. 

For now, I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Fault Domain isolation is the primary use case for our teams with this tool.  Once configured, it centralizes alerting on conditions that would require an experienced NW engineer to investigate at the command prompt.

This tool provides excellent Fault Domain isolation when properly instrumented and configured, allowing quick action on links/routers/switches/etc.

Easy navigation from initial alerts to a full topology and detail on the Network infrastructure and it relationships is the most valuable feature

The configurations are still XML-based and require a good deal of coding to setup each object for monitoring.  Alerting is yet more coding, and relationships are more coding... In a drag-and-drop world, this tool is in need of a bit more than a make-over. 

In house

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.

• 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 & 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 and IBM Tivoli. 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 & Nagios before choosing this product.