CA Application Delivery Analysis [EOL] Reviews

I have only used this solution for two projects. Included in this review are some of my comments about CA Spectrum.

The most valuable feature is the fault management monitoring. This product is the best in the market, without any doubt.

My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances.

For CA Spectrum, the integration of this product is something that needs to be improved. Even some of their point products to not integrate very well, and ADA is one of them.

The user interface needs to be improved.

Technical support needs to be improved.

I began working with CA Application Delivery Analysis ten years ago.

The quality of CA Spectrum is good and I have never faced major issues with it.

This product is able to scale so that you can use it in big companies.

The technical support is something that I used to be satisfied with, but no longer. Since CA was acquired by Broadcom, a lot of good technical people left the company and now we feel it when we call for support.

The initial setup is complex. The length of time for deployment depends on the size of the company and the size of the project. At a minimum, it will take ten to fifteen days, but it could take up to one year.

This is an expensive solution and there is a single price to pay for licensing, with no options. Everything is included with the one license.

Because the licensing has everything included, it is best for the customer to use as much functionality in the product as possible.

If I were rating CA Spectrum then I would give it a nine out of ten.

I would rate CA Application Delivery Analysis a six out of ten.

The ability to analyze traffic is one of the solution's most valuable features.

The user interface needs improvement.

The solution needs to add deep packet analysis to its list of features in an upcoming release.

I'd rate the stability as seven out of ten.

The scalability is okay; I'd rate it as seven out of ten.

I don't have experience with technical support. I handle any technical issues myself.

The initial setup isn't complex, but it's not straightforward either. It's somewhere in the middle. Deployment takes about five days.

The pricing is relatively low compared to other solutions in this area. I'd go so far as to say it's even significantly less than the competition.

I mainly work with the on-premises version of the solution.

I would rate it seven out of ten. It is not the best product on the market, but it is better than the competition if you were comparing prices. Other solutions have more features and functionality than this product.

The ability to configure the application's communication profiles. If correctly configured, then it allows the user to quickly diagnose issues for the application in areas of responsibility: network issue, server issue, application issue.

Being able to diagnose where an issue is for an application is vital. Instead of spending your time figuring out which group (Network, Server, or Application) you should troubleshoot, you can involve the team that needs to troubleshoot. This also highlights the fact that this tool can be viewed by multiple types groups in the organization. They can see the data that is germane to them. Some tools tend to be geared toward one audience type.

Upgrades can be quite complex.

We have used this solution for four years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Technical support is excellent.

This application is the first of its type at my company.

If you get the concept of what the tool is doing, it helps tremendously. The complex portion comes in with spanning traffic to the multi-port collector. For Enterprise solutions, this product requires the use of a physical server that is called the multi-port collector.

The purpose of this device is to capture the traffic and share it with the application for analysis. To keep the multi-port collector from being in the path of traffic, we have configured our Cisco switches to span, (send a copy), of the traffic to the multi-port collector based on VLANs. If you can get the spans working correctly to the multi-port collector, configuring the application is not too difficult.

Licensing isn’t a factor with this product. But the pricing can be very substantial. It can be a decent expense, but if you need to see this type data, it is worth it.

No other products were evaluated. This product grew organically and naturally within our company, since we owned other products from CA.

Do your homework, analyze your network infrastructure, and decide the best location for the multiport collectors. The closer to the servers that you want to monitor, the better. Depending on your architecture, that may require more multiport collectors. PoC (proof of concept) is paramount. CA is great about coming in and doing PoCs. Have CA show you how it works in your environment and then you can base your decision on the need for the data and the ROI (Return On Investment).

Able to give you alerts on possible slow downs of applications even when the users are not complaining yet. Able to work with other products to assist with application traces.

Hard to setup right, Hard to get the conversations right. Possible need to have lots of touch if you try to add custom apps and port usage.

Once it is setup and seeing traffic, it is an impressive tool to show potential problems long before the general users are complaining. This can go along way to being proactive with Application Performance studies. This is one of the tools that can help with gaining more insight into how applications work when they are complex. Often the only server an application knows is involved is the first one and possibly their main DB engine. How the other services are used is not often well understood. This tool can help gain that insight.