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.

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.

We use DX Spectrum for monitoring secured networks.

The most valuable feature is the event correlation mechanism.

I also like the product's multi-customer approach.

They need a seamless integration to launch cloud-based management products of Broadcom.

In the future, more cloud-based solutions will be offered. It is necessary to strengthen the integration with other cloud-based products.

They also have other products that are Operational Intelligence, which is currently stand-alone and usually requires tighter integration. It should be simplified as well, as it is rather complex to create, and doesn't match the ideal situation. 

If the integration is simplified or improved, it will be a unique selling point in comparison to the competition on the market.

I have been working with DX Spectrum for 15 years.

Spectrum is quite stable.

DX Spectrum is very scalable.

Technical support is okay. A few years ago it was better, and I would have given them a ten out of ten, but now I would give them an eight out of ten.

We have extensive knowledge when it comes to using Spectrum. Some teams around me are using Zabbix.

The initial setup is quite complex. It takes a lot of knowledge, but it is well worth the effort.

We have our own consultants who are very knowledgeable key users.

The price is high enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive.

The price should be lower, it's not cheap, but we are willing to pay for it. For example, If you are asking for a Rolls Royce, you have to pay for a Rolls Royce.

I have been evaluating the differences between Spectrum and Zabbix, as well as the pricing.

For us, within that technology area, it is the standard for solutions that we can select. We haven't seen a better product.

Overall, I am happy with this solution.

Based on the current market, I would rate DX Spectrum a nine out of ten.

• 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.

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.

Monitoring. We set it up so that other people can watch everything and let us know if something goes down, or processing needs to be restarted. Then, sometimes, it just does that on its own. Air conditioner overheating. Stuff like that.

For the most part it has been good. There were snags in the beginning, learning curves, and the like, but it's relatively easy.

The monitoring just comes to us: "Oh, there's something wrong with that machine." It tells us. There are some 50,000 machines or so, all doing different things. And if they go down we hear about it.

It's improved things because we know when something's down and we know when something needs to be taken care of and when not.

The fact that I don't have to sit and watch things. They get monitored, and then I hear about them and take care of them as needed.

If they could interact with the MIBs of vendors better, and have a lot more pre-loaded ones, that would be amazing for us right now.

It's up most of the time. It's good. At first there were a couple snags here and there, but lately, it's been great.

One issue, after two weeks, we had to pass it up, escalate it, suddenly, and the next person went and solved it. Most of the time it's been solved or we've talked to engineers. Most of the time it's been good. No one's perfect.

There were problems with it going down, or generating extra tickets. But mostly, that got worked out after a little while, with tech support and us going back and forth getting solutions to the problems. It's been great recently.

What has surprised me most about CA has been the inner knowledge of some of their techs. I had no idea what was going on and they were like, "Hey, we got it."

It's great. You can just keep adding stuff.

I would say it's a lot like other tech support. Some of it is great, and some of it is unreasonable. The ones that know their stuff, know their stuff. And the ones that are learning, are learning.

A couple other solutions. It cancelled some of those out. 

We switched because it was a bigger thing. We swapped so we could have support for just one monolithic thing, as opposed to a lot of little things. 

It just had more support, we could call somebody. It was very complex business software. We probably still don't use 40% of the solution at this point.

I would say mixed bag.

We wanted to make it so it was automated with a text file, so we didn't have to watch the little bar the whole time and answer those questions. We wanted all the configuration in one little file. So we had to figure out where that was and how they do that. Once that got done, then automation of getting it deployed to new environments, if we need to, is very fast. We just change a line or two in the text file and say, "Do this," and walk away. It's great.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• knowledgeable tech support
• reasonable forums
• documentation.

I give it an eight out of 10 because it's not perfect, but it's better than a lot of what's out there. There is still a lot of work you need to do on it. Even though it's a vendor product there is still a lot of support you have to have to get certain things. 

Again, we have a very diverse environment; Cisco stuff, air conditioners. To get all that to work to it's full potential with this product, monitoring-wise, is work. So if there was more interconnectivity already in it that would help. For instance, we had devices that were added six months ago that weren't operating to their full potential. Then we would realize, "Oh, this one needs to be done." So we have to run these end processes. Again, the are a lot of devices. Not all of them are doing this, but enough that we have to sift through them, manually, and get this one working and that one working. So that's why it's not a 10.

In terms of advice, I would tell people to load all the MIBs before you add the devices. Literally.

It has many great features, but in most of the companies that I have done consulting for, they rarely use them as it requires an advanced level of knowledge of the tool.

Event Configuration: A tool in its simplest form creates business logic around events. For example, generate an alarm if Event A occurs and if Event B doesn’t occur within 30 seconds. In its hardest form, you can create a custom state machine for very hard business logic.

Event Correlation: Spectrum has out-of-the-box correlation, but with this tool, you can create custom ones. You can make some alarms hide inside another alarm as a symptom, get root cause analysis, and avoid unnecessary notifications/alarms on the screen.

Topology view: The topology diagrams on CA Spectrum look very nice and they are very useful. We stopped using them because with more than10K devices, the administration was just too painful.

Dynamic models: Integration with the CA Spectrum is awesome. Sending traps with the third-party tools and using the SBG to receive them requires a learning curve. However, once you get it, it is very simple. Unlike another tool, you don’t need to know what the third-party tool is monitoring. In other words, if it sends some data, it will be dynamically created in CA Spectrum.

Reduces the false positives, by creating our own business logic with the Event Configuration.

Allows us to have a single console/notification point, with the alarms of all the tools that we use for monitoring.

It’s like having a Ferrari, without a professional driver. Most companies don’t use all the good features. The out-of-the-box features are just too poor: (Ping, CPU, Disk and Memory, Process, and File Systems). CA Spectrum is an infrastructure monitoring tool, that comes with a few easy to configure metrics, such as Ping, CPU, Disk & Memory, Process and File Systems. However, these metrics are really basic, actually we can do better with Nagios or any other open source tools in the market. In my experience, most big companies, that have CA Spectrum only use it for monitoring these basic metrics, i.e., where the real benefit is not there. If you only want it for this purpose, then there are better and cheaper options available.

It’s mostly for SNMP.

It doesn’t give you performance metrics: You need CA eHealth for this.

Some of the benefits of this solution (also mentioned above) are:

Event Configuration: It can easily (for an expert) create any business logic such as it can alert first, if you receive 2 events from Type A. If you already alert this kind of alarm and it happens again, then do it only, once every hour.

Event Correlation and Root Cause Analysis.

Service configuration (model a service).

Southbound Gateway integration – It can integrate with any other solution and dynamically, create models on CA Spectrum.

Alarms (impact, root cause, symptoms, etc.)

Watches – It can create custom metrics, besides the basic ones that I have mentioned before.

InfoView – It can create custom reports.

Topology view – This one is really difficult and time consuming, but awesome, if you can do it right.

Most companies spend money on the license, but they don’t have a good administrator, to make use of all the good features. So they end up with a really expensive tool, that does only the basic things, which any tool in the market could do probably better. But, the good features of CA Spectrum, only a few monitoring tools can actually do.

I have been using this solution since 2011. I got the CA Spectrum Professional Certificate in 2011.

It is very stable. It rarely fails and you can have a high availability implementation.

Scalability and performance are great. We use both Nagios and CA Spectrum. We can say that Nagios needs around four times more servers than CA Spectrum needs.

I can’t really tell in regards to the technical support. It depends on the guy that answers the phone (Latin America). They have a really excellent technical guy who helped us a few times, but most of the times, the guy that answered the phone knew less than we did.

It was the first solution that we used when I started working. Right now, we are trying Naemon (Nagios). Here is my comparison:

Raw monitoring:

Naemon has a lot more flexibility, i.e., you can script and monitor anything with it, giving you more options than CA Spectrum.

Performance:

CA Spectrum is a lot better. The way they have for consulting SNMP in bulk is great, thus reducing the load a lot. It has around four times more performance with CA Spectrum.

Administration:

CA Spectrum offers you templates, Discovery tools, menus, etc.

In Nagios, we had to develop our own administration tools in order to discover and maintain over 10K devices. This needs a high understanding of the solution.

Business logics:

Here, it is a big win for CA Spectrum. With the events, you can make any of them interact with each other, even with different devices. I can’t think of any business logic that I wouldn’t be able to implement. (I am not saying it is easy, but with a lot of thinking, most of them could be done).

In Nagios, each service runs as an individual check.

The setup is complex for a big environment such as primary servers, slave servers, high availability, and fault tolerance.

If you have a small environment, it is very straightforward. You have the SpectroSERVER, OneClick, and database on the same server, although the recommendation is to split them.

However, the out-of-the box features are very poor for the price, since you are paying per device. You need to use the other features to make it worth it.

It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly.

Try to learn, at least, the following:

Event Configuration

Device Certification

Watches

Alarm Notification Manager

Services

SLA

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.