DX Spectrum Reviews

The primary use case is eyes on glass, operations, responding to tickets, alerts, and incidents tickets. Performance wise it is good. We have a lot of different monitoring tools in the background, so orchestration has been a little bit of a challenge, but I think that is everybody right now. Overall it is a good tool.

• The ability to quickly identify and isolate incidents.
• Automate ticketing

With the service manager today, we are moving the service now into the future.

A lot of the filtering and orchestration of the background takes a lot of manual work. There are a lot of processes involved and it is hard to keep it up-to-date with a lot of moving parts. Making it more dynamic could be better. 

Stability has been good. We really have not had any issues.

Scalability has been good. 

I have not personally used the technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It is good, but there is a lot of growth opportunity in the space. I think CA and a lot of other companies are moving in the direction of orchestrating cross-platforms. Right now, the way we are using Spectrum is really only covering infrastructure and infrastructures out of the house. I think the future with APM and other tools, being able to see more holistically what's happening, is very critical. 

The most important thing is implementation, how it is implemented to enable the operations. In my current role, the operation's visibility and usability are the most important thing. So, making sure it is implemented in a way that it meets the requirement of the operation space. 

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.

The use case for Spectrum is to perform fault management for our managed services infrastructure. We are monitoring around 150,000 endpoints with the tool. 

The root cause analysis, fault isolation engine, and the overall event management that Spectrum brings you.  

It drives topology based views. It gives us network visualization, and lets us detect faults. 

Definitely the way this product needs to go is more web-based. They need to put more emphasis in the web technology. There is some there, and it is being developed, but it is not all the way there. There is a Java fat client that they have not moved all the support from the Java client into the web and that is what they need to do.  

It is a very stable product. No software probably is without any downtime. There has been downtime here and there, but we have maintained well over 98% uptime with the product, and I have been using it for over 10 years. 

Scalability is one of the best factors of the product, because it scales horizontally. 

The CA support is pretty good overall. They get behind what your company is trying to do with their tools. Therefore, they try to understand your use cases and just be there as a partner to help you out.  

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

I would recommend this solution.

The event management that the tool provides is extremely powerful, but with that comes a bit of complexity. For beginner type users, the event management might be a little overwhelming, but as you work with it over time, you can really see what the solution provides for you. With a little bit of time spent, you can get a lot of value out of the product, but it takes a bit of time and understanding.

Spectrum is our correlation engine and an integration point of external monitoring tools. Also, we send UIM traffic to it, then we forward it onto SOI.

• The correlation
• The integration point

The biggest issue is our integration right now between UIM and Spectrum is lacking. It does not allow us to pass all the details. There is a new integration, which has the new version of UIM. I hope it clears up everything.

Spectrum has been very stable.

I do not think we had any scalability issues with Spectrum. We have one of the largest environments, and it is handling it just fine. 

For Spectrum, it is good. For other things, we have had some issues. We had a six day outage once on SOI, but we worked with CA to try to improve that. 

The negative is they have a tendency to ask us to do things that basically we have already done, like balance a service or disable all the policies or something like that. You can tell, they are just walking down a script. This not going to help; logic says this is not going to help anything. 

It would be helpful if they would try to look at the situation and decide this is something that really needs to happen or not. Instead of just doing it to say they have done it.

I was not involved in the initial setup. However, the biggest issue is setting up some of the custom traps is a little complicated. So, you have to have someone that really knows the tool. It could be a little more intuitive overall.

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.

We use Spectrum to monitor our infrastructure, servers, network, routers, switches, to make sure that all of our services and infrastructure components are all up and operational all the time. And if they're not, we're responsible for alerting the people who are responsible for the different components and parts. It's a pretty important part of our operational M.O. as we move forward, making sure stuff is up and running.

The performance has been fantastic.

Since I put this solution in, over the last five years, we have actually reduced the number of alerts that go out and wake people up in the middle of the night by 70%.

The stability of the product is key. It never breaks, really. The stability and reliability of the Spectrum product have been top-notch.

The only reason you're not going to know that your stuff is up and running is because you set it up wrong, not because it's not doing its job.

Better integration with all the other products in the Agile suite of tools; anything they could do to make that less complex, would be great. They've made it less complex, it's getting better as time goes. It's just such a long road because different products were originally different companies that have been hooked together, acquired, and then assembled as their overall solution. And there's good and bad in that.

The good is they have all these capabilities in a one-stop shop. That's awesome. But, sometimes those were competing products that are now having to work together, and they have to come in and force them together. It adds to the complexity.

If nobody else has said documentation, let's go there. I understand, you can either write about it or you can do it. And most of us would rather they do it, but now that they've done it, those of us that didn't do it, we need to go and find: "Where did they write about this to tell us how to do it?" That's always lacking.

Some of the products are better than others at documentation. Some are them are very good and some of them are not as good. It's a little disheartening when you go in to find whatever it is procedure you need to do and it's just not there. Or it's wrong. That's my favorite.

It scales way beyond what we need. I can actually do everything I need to do on one server, even though I have multiple for redundancy. I'm not going to say that I've not had problems with failover and all, because I haven't had to do that; other than me forcing it to do it and switch around. It hasn't actually broken on its own so it hasn't needed to activate its redundancy.

The support folks, that's another aspect of it; partnering with CA to make sure that our stuff is up and running. And if there is a problem with it, they have some really decent people that will get on and help you come up with solutions.

Tech support is great. I usually fill out the surveys when they help me. I haven't had many really bad experiences with support. The people I've worked with, if it's a critical issue, they are right on it. If it's more of a generic thing like, "How do I do that?" they get back to you within a reasonable amount of time with the answer.

I did the architecture and implementation, soup to nuts; made the Kool-aid, served the Kool-aid, drank the Kool-aid, every day.

The nature of what we do in this space is complex anyway. There's only so much you can simplify at this level of complexity. And as much as it is complex, they've made it a simple as they can.

I think the short list for Spectrum was Solar Winds, Nagios, Spectrum, of course, and BMC.

You look around and see there are a lot of home-grown things, and multiple different solutions from different vendors that just don't work together, or they can't work together for whatever reason.

One thing I like about the one-stop shop with CA is we don't have to have staff to be experts in 84 different things. If I need these two things to work together, if nothing else, I can call support and say, "I tried this and it's not working. Why is this not working?" And they'll get on the phone and WebEx and look and eventually you will get it working.

When it comes to my most important criteria for selecting a vendor, ease of use is always one of the top ones: How many people in wagons and trucks, and servers, how many things do I have to have to run this tool, this product? That is the key factor in my evaluation.

Of course, price, obviously, that goes without saying. The cost of some of these products are a little cost prohibitive, which is unfortunate. We have to find lower cost solutions for some of the things that we have to pull in. 

For the most part, CA has capabilities in pretty much everything that you would need. You just have to figure out where are you going to spend the most money for what you have to actually get done. You can do all these things but, which ones do you have to do? And that's hard to choose sometimes because you want to do them all.

We use it for monitoring our applications. Mainly, it open systems to make sure that the databases are up and running, and also the service is up and running. It has become a notification before the business lets us know the system is down. We get to know the system is down first, so that is its main purpose.

It has been performing well. We have had some kinks here and there, but overall it has been good.

The main thing is obviously notifications about alerts, getting ahead of the curve to make sure that we do not have system going down, or if it is down we get to know it earlier. If it is going to go down or if it is down, we get to know it earlier. If it is going to go down, we also get to know it because if the servers degraded and so on, we get to work on it before it really has any business impact.

It is mainly trying to avoid disasters that might be coming, especially with service degradation.

It has improved the way our organization has functioned over the last 10 years. It has had some positive impacts.

Once something goes down, that is when we get alerted versus we need more predictive analytics in place so we know a case based on patterns putting AI in place, or something along those lines, so we know that there is a pattern growing that the systems going to go down. Therefore, it becomes preventative versus reactive, so that is one area of improvement that I can suggest from a product perspective.

I would recommend AI capability built-in so it becomes more predictable and we jump ahead of the curve. This is the one really important feature I would really like to see in any product that provides alarms. 

It has been pretty stable. We have had no problems with Spectrum. 

It has been maximized in terms of the usage. We use if for every possible application, from an application server or to be put on the server itself, monitoring the server, database, etc. You name it we have used it everywhere. 

We are a kind of managed services, so I do not have that information.

This was before my time at the company.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

This was before my time at the company.

I would recommend Spectrum.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. The product needs to meet our needs. 
2. It has to pass Enterprise Architectures conditions and be secure. The product should not have a lot of holes, because if you're going to buy a product, you are going to look at the product first, then the vendor. 
3. From a vendor perspective, it is always associated with what the licensing terms are, and obviously, money matters. Also, looking at the contracts, how flexible they are in terms of working with us on working towards a contract. Whether it be subscription or it is a SaaS product. How we license that product is what I am mainly looking at.

With Spectrum, we are implementing a unified monitoring system. We have also purchased CA APM and Agile Central to complement Spectrum and have an ambitious plan to integrate these systems. This will increase the effectiveness of the IT department and will give us the comprehensive view we want to make better decisions that support our business needs.

Spectrum is very useful for us, because the product lets us monitor and control all the various components of our infrastructure that support our business from an IT perspective.

We are also beginning to implement SOI, in order to view our IT infrastructure from a business perspective. As the boundary between business and IT become more confusing, it becomes more valuable to our users that we in IT can easily and quickly understand the impact of IT services within the business. SOI and Spectrum allow us to achieve this. We can optimize the IT services we offer our users and get a quick view of the business impact. Then, we can adjust priorities and solve problems quicker.

From the users perspective the looks and feel of dashboards of Spectrum would be easier to use and for understanding as APM will be in 10.5 version which we saw in CA World.

Also, from our point of view, It´s necessary that CA people in charge of Spectrum tool, work more in order to better integration between Spectrum, with APM, SOI and UIM.

We had some stability issues at the first, but CA resources in Argentina assisted us in to solving these problems. They also helped to fine tune our configuration to support the solution. In the early stages, we implemented a simple configuration of Spectrum, so sometimes we faced up-time problems. But that was due, in part, to the design we implemented. So, now we have implemented a more robust design with more servers and more robust databases. The solution is now stable enough to support the challenges we want to monitor.

We have not experienced any scalability issues, because we used a step-by-step approach. First, we implemented Spectrum at a pilot with branches. We use a dashboard that allows us to monitor the components at our 110 branches to support our products. Next, we applied the same idea to our strategic and critical challenges in website and mobile applications, as well as in our retail and corporate business.

Customer Service:

Very Good, from CA and from Partners

Technical Support:

Technical support is very good. In Latin America, they have good technicians, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Whenever we need support on a difficult to solve issue, CA brings in specialists to solve the problem quickly.

Before choosing Spectrum, we used an open-source solution called Nagios. We also used a monitoring tool from BMC called PEM, Patrol Enterprise Management. In 2009, our bank decided to implement the complete suite of tools for IT management and delivery from CA. It's a strategic decision that we took six or seven years ago and we're happy with the switch.

Initial setup was easy, but in the initial stages we need more support from CA and our CA partner in order to understand the capabilities of Spectrum and how to take advantage of all of this.

Yes, from IBM

When we evaluate vendors we look at technical skill and background. We want them to be able to understand our business objectives and our needs. This is the most important. We want them to be more service oriented than product oriented, because the main objective of the IT department in a bank is to maintain up-time regardless of the challenges we face. This is critical to our business.