DX Spectrum Reviews

I have been involved in implementing DX Spectrum for financial institutions, such as banks, and government services with large networks. My role involves monitoring their infrastructure worldwide to address critical issues proactively and fix things before users start complaining. We focus on selling to financial institutions, especially banks in Nigeria.

DX Spectrum offers effective network fault detection. Depending on user requirements, it can monitor infrastructure to track activities on servers or monitor network connectivity. It provides a good topology view of the environment, eliminating latency around applications in different locations. Additionally, its performance management capability enhances network operations by allowing users to manage the network effectively. The interface has the needed configuration for visualization, and it's effective in providing a complete diagram of network links and connections across various stations globally. This helps in identifying if a client's link is down or up.

We primarily use DX Spectrum for network monitoring, deep analysis, and root cause analysis. It is also used for error detection and sending events to SOI, an add-on product from Broadcom. These events are then forwarded to our service management tool, SC3. 

The best thing about Spectrum is its stability. We have not had any downtime since we started using it. It has been consistently up and running without any priority one errors. It is also very quick.

I am not working for cellular. I am a service provider. I am using all these tools for the UK customers.

DX Spectrum uses an SNMP Trap to accept all the details, especially for device monitoring of faulty devices, allowing me to use Spectrum effectively. 

DX Spectrum focuses more on device monitoring. It has a dashboard and a lighting mechanism. The performance manager is very good. It has thresholds and everything, and it shows the overall network health. It scans all the devices through the network via NSM. 

DX Network integrates with DX Net apps. The DX Net apps include all kinds of dashboards and integrate with event management tools, network tools, and all these tools from Broadcom. I am actively working on it. We completed earlier stages, and we are implementing almost more than eighty percent. It has many features. It has observability, automatic analysis, predictions, and everything.

The most valuable feature is it’s ability to monitor our network. We have a fairly sizable network with over 4000 nodes. Ultimately, at a hospital, network integrity is a patient care issue, so you want to make sure that the network is up as close to 100% as possible, 24/7 365. Hospitals don't close, so it needs to support that.

Its ability to alert us on network issues before they become critical is a great benefit. For example, say one of the power supplies on a device that has more than one goes down. Spectrum alerts us so we're aware of it, we can go and take care of the issue. If there are temperature issues, like if closets are hot, or something happens in the data closet, we are forewarned that there could be an issue happening. We can go and address it before anything happens.

The latest release I think is 10.2, and that may still be in beta right now, but we're on the newest version of the software. I don't necessarily know if there's anything in the latest release that has helped us, because we've been using Spectrum for about 5 years now. All the new releases do have their own advantages. I just don't know if we're leveraging any of those in relation to the latest release.

• Event management
• Fault management
• NFV support

The companies in which I have deployed this solution have benefited in several ways. From the technical perspective, they have a clear picture of their monitored systems and their dependencies. From the business perspective, they have improved MTTR significantly, creating an elevated ROI ratio.

We use this solution for monitoring both service provider networks as well as customer WAN / LAN / VOIP networks, including all kinds of SNMP-based edge devices.

The key solution to be solved is the correlation between all types of messages from all devices. We are receiving more than 1,000,000 SNMP messages a day across many types of domains.

Unifying the solution within our organization created a standard way of working and integration. We needed a centralized redundant solution for all of our domains, which requires an SNMP-based monitoring tool.

We were able to standardize the internal processes across all internal departments, resulting in almost an elimination of non-standard process flows through our organization.

We were also able to standardize by cross-learning from all teams on how we should configure the monitored elements, align the configuration of the monitoring application, and use the solution such that it created a common understanding of the best practices.

By implementing the automatic service incident, a very strong closed loop is created in the monitoring of the domains.

We use it to monitor the fault of our network to make sure that the infrastructure that delivers our services to our end users is up and all the redundancy is up. 

It performs really well in these tasks. It is one of its core competencies.

Spectrum is heavily loaded with alarm configuration, so it can detect whenever things go wrong. Things that I didn't even know could go wrong on my network. It picks up on those. I have integrated it into my ITIL management, incident management, change management, and problem management systems, so it feeds right in to my existing processes.

A valuable feature is the topology view. You can view the topology. Other valuable features are the host configuration, the NCM feature, the policy manager that it has and the scalability. That's one of the biggest ones.

When I started working, we only had 35,000 devices in there. Because of the scalability and all that, we have over 100,000 in Spectrum right now. All of them are SNMP managed.

We have a DR site. We are testing the latest release right now. In our production, we have 9.3.3 and it's running good. With our requirements as they are expanding, for example, one of the issues that we have is the global collection, the real-time global collections. For example, let’s say, just the southwest region has 15,000 devices, and that group wants to have interface global collection; that's going to be over 300,000-400,000 interfaces, and they wanted real-time interfaces. That really bogs down the database, so we are looking at 10.1. In there, the scalability is going to improve a lot with that.