DX Spectrum Reviews

The most valuable features start with the core feature fault management and then the Configuration Manager; Service Manager; Watches; event management and event correlation; MIB tools; and the fact that it is fully customizable.

CA Spectrum as a fault management tool from a service provider perspective, turns your network management team from reactive to proactive, minimizes the network management staff number requisite, and gives you a centralized view of all your network faults. From a customer perspective, it assures you about your network health and availability. The configuration management feature relieves you the burden of manually saving all yours devices configurations. It allows you to massively upload standard configurations to a group or to all your network devices. The service manager feature allows you to look at your network devices as a collection of assets that plays a role on a service instead of looking at them as an individual network asset. I could give you much more examples.

There's always room for improvement! In order of importance, I would say that CA should start to get rid of Java on the OneClick console. They could highly improve the Configuration Management feature, the schedule manager and the watch's allowed types and formulas.

I have used CA Spectrum for eight years.

The most stable version I've worked with was the 8.1 and the 9.1.3 running on Windows Server 2003. Every versions running on Windows Server 2008 (R2) that I've worked after that (versions 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4) have had some issues either with OneClick/Spectro Server communication (hanged alarms for instance) or with global loss of SNMP communication with network devices, or DDMdb increasing indefinitely or with some unexplainable SSDB crashes. I haven't worked yet with version 9.10 but I am pretty sure that the 64-bit architecture was a huge improvement for the platform performance.

The DSS (Distributed SpectroServer) deployment is quite good for scalability. The only issue with it is when you need to discover connections between devices that stand in different SpectroServers (different pollers). You cannot find relations between them at all! The only workaround I know is to duplicate the devices that are doing the bridge between whatever you have in one poller and the other poller in both pollers!

Although they behave differently depending on the zone you are in (US, Europe or West Asia), for basic and common issues they are good. For more advanced (models database issues for instance) or specific issues (monitoring interfaces running HSRP for example), they will struggle with it and most likely won't be able to give you a solution! If you want to fully explore the features of the platform, you will need to dig it by your own. One curiosity detail about CA regarding CA Spectrum is that as they released new versions of CA Spectrum, they start to hide the deepest features, such as the creation of different model types in the catalog database. You can still do it but, if you want documentation of it, you need to go to look for it at Aprisma and/or Concord documentation (these are the previous vendors of CA Spectrum). If you start with customization issues, even if they are well documented in the manuals, the support will most likely advice you to contact the CA Special Services and close your issue.

I didn't use a previous solution. I've always worked with CA Spectrum.

Depending on the operating system, you may need more or less pre-install tasks (installation user privileges, hosts file configuration, then in Linux you need specific packages, disable or configure IP tables, or in Windows disable UAC, DEP, firewall, etc.). The platform installation is straightforward. Always use dedicated servers for CA Spectrum and if you have the chance to, install the platform in virtual machines making snapshots at important checkpoints. It will spare you a lot of work and troubles.

In my former company we had a per device licensing. I'm not aware of the values.

I've been working with CA Spectrum since my first work day. I was never in a position where I could take that kind of decision.

Try to test and tune every feature you want to implement in a controlled environment. CA Spectrum is a powerful solution that will allow you to do almost everything you ever needed to monitor your network infrastructure. Due to its many features, there are always multiple ways of achieving the same goal. Picking the most efficient is the hard task. For every monitoring/management challenges that you face, you have always the last resort alternative, which is using your own scripts/programs to interact with CA Spectrum Web Service, VNMSH, or even adventure yourself (re)writing Java code using the CORBA API.

It's a mature product and has been around for a long time. The technical support is up to speed and it has been well designed.

It gives us a visual representation of what's going on in the network. It hasn't helped me personally but it has helped the network. We haven't moved on to the latest version yet but integration with UIM will be one of it's benefits.

It is not so much in regards to the product itself. In my opinion, it's the documentation that I find is not up to the mark. Instead of reading 400 pages, if they could just give me one simple example, it would make things a lot easier because it's a very complex product that does a lot of complex things. I would like to have illustrations on how to do the simple things as opposed to sending me a link that refers to 400 pages of a manual; it doesn't help. Saying “select the criteria” is meaningless if I don’t have the basic knowledge of what the criteria means or why I’m selecting it.

It is very stable.

The product is very scalable as well.

We have used technical support. It's hit or miss. Sometimes you get people who are really good and sometimes you don't. However, you can usually escalate quite quickly.

Our company was partially using CiscoWorks before this product.

I would definitely recommend this product to others.

The most important criteria whilst selecting a vendor is reliability.

Monitoring window, graphical representation of devices, automatic updating of databases, high scalability, high robustness, and user-friendly options are some of the most valuable features for us.

It can be made to operate on a cloud with load balancing capabilities which doesn't occupy much memory. The application can be modeled to support users from different teams to intercommunicate.

CA Spectrum is an important tool for our organization in that it manages loads of server capacity in a single platform and deploys different kinds of windows for device management, database storage, graphical representation of devices, and highlights fail-overs in realtime.

While deploying the tool, there were space and storage issues since the application loads for a long period each time there is an update.

I have used this solution for about 2 years.

There were long loading periods during deployment.

A device can't be 100% stable and robust. However, CA Spectrum is one of the most stable systems to handle at medium to high-level operations.

The tool is designed to enhance operational scalability, and hence it was updated according to the customer and market needs.

Customers have found the tool really useful because it is user friendly and lets them to login to their devices manually to check the health of any site.

I would give an eight out of ten for their level of technical expertise with reference to this application. They have been amazing in their service.

It was the first ever solution I tried and it worked so I never had a chance to work on other solutions. This applications works best on medium to large-sized organizations.

The initial setup was to download and install the software, which takes a few minutes for installation. It is a straightforward process and is not rocket science.

The initial implementation was through a vendor and I would rate them 8 out of 10. The vendor management team has a very good technical expertise .

Return on Investment matters are known mostly to management and in my experience it is found to be effective. ROI provides a profitability ratio.

It's a licensed software and internationally certified. It is priced at a median level for any organization to start using the software and tool.

I did not try any other option. It was my first ever option and it worked. The application is well-suited for network monitoring.

I would advise any engineer to use the application because it is user friendly and secure. I would recommend any organization that requires network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities all in a single platform.

Our primary use case is alarm monitoring.

What I like best is the configuration management functionality. I can configure a couple of devices at once, and I can certify the device in the configuration on my own, without depending on the vendor.

I have seen that there are some configuration issues with Huawei devices. Huawei devices are not properly supported, and there are incompatibility issues related to certain protocols.

The stability could be improved.

The rate at which our stability issues are resolved could be improved.

I have been using DX Spectrum for three years.

There are issues with any product, but for issues related to DX Spectrum, we receive upgrades. It can take some time, and occasionally we do not achieve the SLA times, but at the end of the day, we are getting our upgrades to the critical issues.

We do plan on continuing to use this product in the future.

We have deployed this monitoring system for an ISP in Sri Lanka, and there are more than 100 users. It is also integrated with a performance monitoring and management system.

The technical support is of lower quality since the acquisition by Broadcom. At this point, we are not satisfied with the technical support. It should definitely be faster.

The initial setup is straightforward, and the upgrade process is also straightforward.

We handle the implementation and deployment ourselves. Three people are enough for deployment and maintenance. The engineers take care of the implementation and overall administration.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Network monitoring.

It has performed very well, as expected. It allows us to be proactive with any sort of network issues, address the problems before they become critical problems.

Allows us to be proactive.

If we can be proactive, we maintain maximum uptime of our network infrastructure. It allows us to address issues before they take a network down, for example.

HTML5. Right now, it is a very Java driven application. We have lots of issues. If we do have any issues with the front end side of it, it would be Java. Dealing with Java and all the changes that are constantly happening with Java.

Stability is very good.

Scalability has been very good. I've never noticed any issues. I've used the product on a 2000-node network and on a 10,000-node network.

Tech support is very good. I've never had any issues.

We weren't using anything before Spectrum. We needed a product to monitor our network equipment for these type of things.

I'd say it's medium. You need to know how to tailor the product to your environment.

We looked at a couple of different products; I can't remember which ones, exactly.

When we are selecting a vendor, what is important to us are

• stability
• proven background of actually doing it 
• cost to actual functionality.

I would say to seriously take a look at Spectrum. It is a very stable and good product.

The valuable features of this tool are its scalability and ability to automate inputs and outputs of a closed system.

This solution provides critical data to our network engineers about performance of our infrastructure.

I’d like to see better access to data elements via the API as well as better elements for the UIs. The UIs are somewhat inflexible and we'd like to see that improve.

The tool is very stable.

The tool scales very well.

I have used technical support and I would give them a rating of 3 out of 5.

We were using another CA product. We had to integrate that system with other systems, but it lacked the API. We decided to upgrade to APM for that reason.

I was involved in the setup and it was straightforward.

The alternatives that we considered besides CA were EMC, SevOne, and a variety of other products.

When selecting a vendor, I look for stability, the ability to meet our needs, and the ability for their products to integrate with other products that we use.

If you are looking for a product, make sure that the solution you chose integrates well with your other systems.

The ability to receive and correlate alarms and determine impacts when outages occur.

As a user of it, it's been fantastic just because it does so many things all in one configuration section. The alarms monitoring of the correlation of events is valuable. It’s been a great experience.

I would like to see easier use in some things, such as trying to configure certain correlations I've been working on. It's been a little bit of a hassle, because I'm not super familiar with their products and the best way to go about things.

Stability has been great once you get it up and running. I've had issues getting new installs to work, but once it's finally going and all set up to go, it's been fantastic.

I was involved in a couple of installations. It was very straightforward. It was just a matter of installing the package, doing the extraction, running it, and it seemed to work.

In terms of choosing a network management applicationsvendor, look for stability and ease of use. I've seen that with the other applications. We have issues happening all the time, although I haven't seen it with CA. I would suggest getting your hands on a product in a lab and play around with it.

The network monitoring features are the product’s most valuable, due to the lack of these capabilities in any other monitoring tool. No other application monitors networks as well as Spectrum.

Free tools are available to do what its other features do, such as server monitoring (CPU/memory/disk).

We are not using the latest version of the tool yet, but as far as I know, I think an improving reporting of data would be a good idea. The report area is very poor and we cannot work properly with additional information and the custom reports. We just use the default report for information that we have inside the database for these reports.

I've been working with this tool for eight years.

To be honest, Spectrum is one of the most stable and less problematic solutions that we work with. It’s easy to scale and to deploy. The only time we’ve had problems with it was with some upgrading processes. It is not so intuitive and you have to make sure everything is correct.

The CA support team is really capable and efficient when it comes to Spectrum. Most of the time they help us surprisingly fast and correctly.

I’ve worked with free tools such as Zabbix / Nagios. Right now, we only work with CA products and, as I’ve written, Spectrum is the way to go when you need networking monitoring.

Setting up general monitoring is straightforward. However, if you need something different than the standard setup, some customizations need to be done. Thus, it becomes more complex as a whole.

We have an ongoing vendor support team and we have an in-house one. For implementation advice, I would say to always plan your monitoring according to what you really need to monitor on your environment. Most of the problems we find today are related to operation process issues and not the tool at all. People have to know what they want before implementing the solution.

As I’ve written, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.