DX Spectrum Reviews

It's easy to implement. I've used it for 15 years so I may be biased, but that's also a testament to how easy it is to use.

It's also very configurable. You can add features as you'd like. For example, you can easily add new alerts and watch lists. We can easily certify new devices and watch the behavior of these new devices out of the box.

You can add scripting and export results to an external database. It makes it easy to use and sort the information in a way that can be helpful to you. I could go on for a week about it.

Currently I'm happy they went to 64 bit, which has just finished. I haven't thought about other improvements; maybe better reporting. Currently, it's using BOXI/CABI, which is terrible as it’s unclear and I don’t like this.

I've used it for 15 years. We use Spectrum on the network infrastructure for five to six clients. We also sell it as an integrator to other clients as well.

It’s very, very stable which is the core benefit, and it’s also very easy to maintain. It doesn’t need much maintenance once it's set up. The strongest point of the product is it's stability.

Last year they didn't do a lot of development, and when they did it, it wasn’t secure enough. Each version took a long time to be stable, but it's gotten much better. Now it's totally stable, but 9 wasn't stable. 9.4.0 wasn’t stable, but 9.4.1 is. Overall, version 9 has been great.

It's quite scalable. You can easily set up a distributed environment with more than one central server. We currently have it scaled up to 5000 devices on one central server (high for Belgium), and once they release v10.1 it'll be even higher, I've heard.

We're very happy with the technical support. Once, I wasn't that happy, but now I've taken technical sessions with them and they've been helpful. Many technical engineers who are assigned to me actually know me to some degree, but this is for their product. Performance management wasn’t as good, and their service for this is superior.

Before we were using the HP solution, but then CA bought them. We like this vendor becuase of the strong network management system. So, what’s important to me is particularly the product more than the vendor. Vendors that integrate would be a nice plus. That’s the main reason we initially actually stayed with CA because the products can talk to each other, which has a good flow.

This is my job – to start form nothing and then help others set up. I also help others use it as well, so I scale it up for myself and others, and CA has been helpful.

Get an overall perspective. CA is helpful and you should be willing to talk to them.

We use the solution in fault management. 

We can monitor MPLS network VPN, network configuration, and backups. It's highly scalable for network configuration management.

DX Spectrum needs to incorporate faster support. 

I have been using the product for five years. 

DX Spectrum is stable. 

The product is scalable. My company has 500 users. 

The tool's deployment is easy. 

The tool helps to monitor performance management. We can also see the topology and understand how our network connects different zones. This tool lets you easily access comprehensive information from a single console. It integrates easily with third-party applications. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

Our customers use the software for network monitoring.

It is a complete and ready-to-use tool. It has many features compared to other competitors.

The product is complicated to use.

I have been using DX Spectrum for around 12 years as a consultant.

I rate the stability of the product an eight out of ten.

We have four users for DX Spectrum. It is easy to scale. I rate the scalability a six out of ten.

It is deployed on the cloud and has an easy initial setup process.

It is an expensive solution compared to other tools in the market.

DX Spectrum's graphical interface is high quality and easy to use. I rate it an eight out of ten.

Mostly SNMP trap management.

I am fairly new to the product end of the solution. We have not utilized it to its full capabilities yet. I think we are still trying to figure out how to get the most out of it. 

The network mapping functionality.

I would like to see better scalability, and maybe, a more intuitive user interface. 

It seems fairly stable. We have had some issues with the spec server and the high availability replication of data. It fails over well, but it does not come back very well. We get duplicated events. 

It seems okay, but not great. 

Good, if you get the right people. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have looked a little into open source solutions.

The product is not terrible, but not great.

Implemented with Enterprise Customers across region. Very strong Fault Management tool , Extra ordinary correlation & alarming. Not to difficult to implement but eventually adv. correlation is not easy to implement.

It helps our customer in managing the events , correlations & creation of auto tickets with CA Service Desk. Eventually it helps customer in automation.

Its not performance management tool for Network Performance Management you need to have CA UIM or CA eHealth.

12+

We encounter multiples issues , difficult to list all. Some of them far beyond out of the box implementation. Other CA Support helps us to resolve it.

No

Not at all .

Customer complains it lags for performance management which CA has other solution of it.

4-5 No good technical support from CA

CA NSM, Solarwind

its depend on the scope of project. But initial setup is not difficult for this solution.

We are solution implementer , and we had implemented across various ent. customer.

Different customer has different.

Pricing generally is high but you need aquire multiple products in order to accomplish complete infrastructure management. Cant get everything with CA Spectrum alone when it comes to network monitoring. Netflow is not there too.

Yes

• Ease of administration
• Topology
• Root cause identification
• Design

Our company is sectorized and each area has its role in the process, where the administration and support of the assets are executed by specific areas. However, the operation and NOC 24x7 require quick, visual understanding and with clear alarms to trigger the affected team as soon as possible, minimizing impacts.

I work in a data center with more than 2000 assets to be monitored. We were able to clearly identify the root cause of incidents visually and with specimen alerts with the topology design.

There is room for improvement in the integration with other non-CA tools and databases. With some items that I scored, I have noticed that there have been significant changes in version 10, such as the WebClient.

We have some information collected by proprietary tools and some data stored in applications with our own development and we have difficulties in integrating/importing/exporting data to update and maintain the data.
Regarding the functionality of version 10, even though it is still in the stage of deployment and maturation, we realize the WebClient functionality already attends to much of the need following the occurrences without depending on the implementation of the Java client.

Another improvement I noticed in the new version was the greater capacity of absorbing devices in the same SpectroSERVER, facilitating the administration/maintenance of the tool and reports.

We have used the CA Spectrum solution for about 7 years.

There were no stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. In version 9, we had to scale up due to the expansion of the assets to be monitored; however, there were no problems. With version 10, we had improvements since it supports more assets in the same Spectrum Server.

Technical Support is essential for monitoring activities. We use it frequently, as well as consulting hours, to identify improvements and best practices.

We tested other tools to see how well they met our needs; however, we did not see satisfactory results, and they had the same functionalities as what we already used.

As we operate in partnership with CA, we have had more input regarding implementations. The greatest difficulty is to understand the topology and to design the best possible way of implementing it to identify the connections.

As I am from the technical area, I do not have much to say about the financial aspects.

The company tested tools to verify functionalities and possible integrations, but has always adopted market tools with a quality standard to be able to provide it as a service in our portfolio. We have been unsuccessful in testing other tools for the features we are looking to serve with CA Spectrum.

Planning is key. Identify the topologies and design to be implemented and rules to be conducted for problem identification and alarms. Ensure that you have good support as a partnership for difficulties.

The product is rich in features, so a lot of them are valuable.

Network Configuration Manager - Backup network device configuration, enforce policies, enforce configuration and correlate configuration changes with network status. Also has an approval workflow for changes on devices.

Certification - You can certify devices in several levels. The most complex ones give you great results for your efforts, such as a certification using a Model Type Editor for a customized model type along with Event Admin to receive alerts from another source and redirect to your new models based on Name (this allows for creating virtual environments to monitor devices without IP if you have a manager with IP/SNMP for them) or IP, creating Dynamic Alarm Titles. This gives great value, because it becomes really easy for your operations team to know exactly what is happening by just looking at the alarm console, instead of searching for the problem in the alarm description.

Event Correlation - Great to map events and to correlate them before generating alarms. It works with event pairs, event count, event series and other methods; really useful.

Condition Correlation - Great for correlating alarm conditions with devices. For example, you have a router redundancy, and you don’t want two different alarms for Device Down. You can create a domain and rules to specify that if only both of the routers are down, it will generate a new alarm with the possibility to use whatever name you want for that new alarm.

Service Dashboard - This one is particularly great, because customers love it. It allows you to give them a service-oriented view of their infrastructure without having to use another tool for that. Because it’s part of CA Spectrum, the service is affected immediately after an alarm occurrence.

It allowed us to move from an open-source solution using six servers to an enterprise solution using two servers to monitor the same number of elements. Also, of course, the product offered a lot of features ready to use that we didn’t have before.

The Systems Performance Agent is powerful, but, for example, if you want to run a sql query and set a threshold against the returned value, you can’t directly. You need a script with the threshold set in the script and an exit different than zero (0) to generate an alarm. This is something that almost every monitoring solution on the market has built-in. CA UIM, for instance, does that really well. What you have ready to use is the ability to execute the query and get the value for how much time it took to execute.

I have used it since January 2009.

I have not encountered any stability issues so far.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far.

Technical support is very good.

We previously used a different solution, and we switched mainly because the company needed scalability.

We were using Zabbix, a similar product, at the time, and we had a custom poller written in C and six servers to make it run. However, to get it past 12k elements (the break point for this solution), we would have to redo the entire file system using GFS from Red Hat to allow simultaneous write for a shared storage area. So, when we presented the project, the company realized it was time to invest in an enterprise solution. CA Spectrum was the winner after a series of tests and PoC process with the suppliers.

To install CA Spectrum and discover the network, it required half a day, back in 2008. Some of the competitors couldn’t complete the PoC after one week.

And CA Spectrum offered also a variety of OOTB features such as an easy certification process, VLAN discovery and other stuff.

Initial setup was very simple; as simple as Next - Next – Finish. The complex part isn’t the setup, but the planning (architecture and such).

Right now, it’s device based, so count what you have and estimate your total growth for at least one year. CA works on a trust-based method.

At the time we decided to switch from an open source to an enterprise solution, we evaluated HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, EMC Smarts.

Don’t try to do the planning without consulting a CA Partner or an expert. You will need help in other matters also; must have a good knowledge of SNMP protocol. Always read the documentation, which is very rich, and use the communities for extra help besides the support.

CA Spectrum is awesome for networks, but when paired with CA UIM, you can have everything: datacenter, networks, virtualization and on.

The topology view, Global Collections and Fault Isolation algorithms pinpoint the exact point of failure.

It gives you a proactive approach. It is almost like it can foresee what's coming fault-wise speaking, and the key is the proprietary Inductive Modeling Technology that it has that gives it that edge ahead of other products.

I think the interface needs a bit of a revamp. They need to adapt it to the new app world that it is now ruling (iOS, Android Apps), and it needs to offer more. Also, the Sizing tool is a bit old, and the last time I used it the CPU recommendations for our SpectroSERVERs given by the tool were Pentium IV. I can see that now there is an online updated tool that can assist with your design which is good.

I’ve been using it for almost eight years.

In earlier versions, the installations were a bit clunky and troublesome, but after v8 this improved dramatically, even installing large deployments were a breeze to do.

v6.6 had few hiccups, but in general it is a very mature product. It's been around since 1991 when it was owned by Cabletron.

When properly designed and you have your base installed, to scale it up or out is a walk in the park. You just need to introduce the new server, what role it has, and whether it's part of the FT environment and you’re done.

Pretty good. I must say, CA is an excellent company and their client always comes first. Every time I have worked with CA support, they were very insightful and had deep knowledge of the solution and how to tackle the issue.

Back in 2005, when I started working with Spectrum, the level of support engineers they had in the L2 was amazing! They provided deep knowledge and exact root cause solutions when I challenged them.

I tested different products before Spectrum. Tivoli was one of them, but it was too complicated and troublesome to configure and maintain. I didn’t like the interface of BMC Patrol as it wasn’t very intuitive, and HP OpenView was the same with a very unappealing GUI, and the algorithms used to keep track of changes in the network and root cause analysis very basic. I didn’t switch, it was only that I worked with these tools before working with Spectrum.

It’s not very complicated, just by following the manual guides were good enough to do a basic installation

It was an in-house implementation but I did training in America which helped me dramatically to fine tune the post-installation.

The pricing could be a bit steep if you are a mid-sized or small company, this is an enterprise product, designed and built for huge environments. Licensing used to be easy, and CA had a template depicting all the possible combinations for licensing, I don't know how easy it is nowadays.

Think big, and look to exploit all this product has to offer around Fault & Service Management. When I was the Enterprise Administrator in a big data center in South America, my motto was: if the coffee machine has a network card, we can monitor it and see if we are out of coffee. Spectrum is capable of doing this and more.