DX Spectrum Reviews

The university purchased DX Spectrum, called ICE. DX Spectrum NAC is working for us only on Cisco 9200 switches. It is not working on any other switch like C1000 or HG or any 2960X. Even other Cisco switches are not working. Only the 9k series functions properly.

We are using only DX Spectrum NAC, ICE and the wireless controllers of Cisco.

We are buying now three models of access points: CW1, CW91726 and 8. We have not purchased the NDA, DNA dashboard currently, but maybe later we will, because it is only one controller and we did not find any benefit from installing it.

DX Spectrum includes a module called Spectrum and Nimsoft. The product for monitoring and getting alerts from servers and some systems is called Nimsoft software from CA.

We are setting some thresholds to get alerts when a link is down or getting to a high bit rate, things like that.

It has many capabilities. Since we do not have many licenses, I can monitor the main aggregate switch of a building and all its ports. I am getting to see many switches if their status is going down. I have an aggregate switch with 40 ports, and when I monitor not only the switch but all its ports, I can monitor another 40 switches without needing another license.

We only monitor storage, servers, and switches.

Of course. We installed it and set some alerts, but in the daily mission, we are not dealing with it very much.

What I said is that we do not know everything about how to build the dashboard, but for what the management requires, it is very simple.

The product is installed in some version, and we have another person managing it. We need to upgrade to the current version and maybe solve any bugs if there are.

The time investment required is significant, not because of difficulty but because of the need for free time to invest in it.

We need to get the knowledge. We know there are many options, but we took an external vendor to install and make the customization. If we want to make others changes without paying for customization, we need to learn it deeply by ourselves.

The tutorials are very complicated. They could work on that area. The tutorial part could be more simplified. I know there are many explanations, and you can get help or documents in one click on the current page in the product, but it is not very clear.

If you want to do something new that you did not see from the vendor in the installation, it is not very simple. The documents are good for people that know how to operate the product well, but for new users, it is not simple.

You can set a threshold to say if it goes over 90% CPU or 90% disk usage in operating systems. We can also set a threshold to bandwidth. If the bandwidth goes over 50%, we wish to get alerts.

We found the process of DX Spectrum down from time to time, and we need to interfere manually to restart. I give it an eight.

When I said vendor, I meant partner. It is a company here in Israel called Malam.

Neutral

We stopped buying Juniper. We are buying only Cisco now.

We have stopped purchasing Juniper for more than one year. For more than one year, we are purchasing only Cisco. Only Cisco 9200.

We did not learn all the capabilities. We are using what is needed for us.

It is another person that took responsibility for that. We are working with an external vendor, so it is not complicated.

The product is installed in some version.

I did not check other products. I know there are cheaper options in the market, but they are not as good as CA. When we say CA is a Mercedes, you buy a very expensive car and know it is good, with all options and capabilities that you can dream of, but you need to configure it, find it, and learn it.

We purchased CA. CA is a big product we installed a few years ago for monitoring. We also have some free products like Zabbix.

Since we have a lot of products for monitoring like Zabbix and others, the main requirement from CA was especially for managers. They want to come in the morning and see if all is green. CA is very complicated but has a lot of features. For that, we need someone to invest time, learn, and customize and configure. The product itself is full of many features.

We need to upgrade to the current version and maybe solve any bugs if there are. We did not find any bugs.

It was not simple, but since the vendor is an expert, it seems simple to him. I do not think it is simple.

If we cut the price issue, I would rate it nine. Overall, I rate this solution an eight.

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.

DX Spectrum should have an automatic ticketing mechanism with ServiceNow. I need to use other tools for event management. It has a dashboarding mechanism and monitors devices and network switches through SNMP without an agent, which is good, but it should also have event management. 

Its LDAP authentication is fine. However, event management is not available, which is a concern. Not much else. If they can add event management, it would help. The event management should have more deduplication and alert correlation and check the bidirectional communication with ServiceNow. 

If a previous ticket is open and the same alert is generated, there's no need to create another ticket; updating the work notes would suffice. It should help reduce noise in alerting.

I have been using DX Spectrum for almost five to six years. It's used by my team.

Broadcom technical support is very good. 

Neutral

I have a NetFlow, and I have other tools, however, Spectrum is more efficient.

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

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. There are one or two features they can add in the future. I am using a SaaS solution, software as a service, and I am asking them to customize the tool based on our needs. 

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.

I would like to see improvements in making the interface more user-friendly. Many people find it not simple to use. One of the common customer complaints is about the alarm notifications. Currently, they appear as pop-up messages, but I would prefer having alarm messages shown as a scrolling bar at the taskbar for easier visibility.

I have been working with DX Spectrum for over seven years now.

I believe DX Spectrum is used in large-scale network environments.

I would rate their support as eight out of ten, which implies it's fairly strong, although there is room for improvement.

Positive

The price of DX Spectrum is not competitive when compared to other solutions, such as SolarWinds. The high price has caused us to lose many deals.

I have compared DX Spectrum with other solutions, like SolarWinds.

Generally, I would recommend DX Spectrum because, despite its pricing issue, it is a valuable solution. From my experience, I rate DX Spectrum nine out of ten. I advocate for a more user-friendly interface so that anyone looking at it will know what to do. Also, DX Spectrum's integration of AI for network management tasks is something I'm interested in but haven't explored yet.

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.

Support from Broadcom could be better. Sometimes we wait a very long time for a solution to level three problems.

Challenges and Limitations

The only other challenge is the price, which is the main reason for considering a switch to SolarWinds.

Spectrum is expensive, and the people at my company have suggested replacing it with SolarWinds. They claim SolarWinds is 85% cheaper than Spectrum. I am looking for documentation to support the continued use of Spectrum.

While I think Spectrum is priced at market value, we did have a significant price increase from Broadcom two years ago, which we passed on to the other company's locations. This has caused some pushback, and one location has made a proposal to switch to SolarWinds, claiming it is 85% cheaper. My boss has asked me to investigate this, as 85% is a compelling argument for change. However, I don't believe this claim and am looking for evidence to support the continued use of Spectrum.

My team has been using DX Spectrum for at least ten years, I personally started working with it in May 2022.

Spectrum is scalable. We use it for all the company's locations. It is easy to add new devices and scale the solution.

Support from Broadcom could be better. Sometimes we wait a very long time for a solution to level three problems.

The installation process is quite normal. We built up the Spectrum program modules in two months with approximately two engineers.

Maintenance:

Maintenance is necessary and requires support, but it's usually straightforward and fine. We are generally very satisfied with Spectrum. Our network experts in different locations at the second-level support company are also very satisfied.

Our network experts have designed racks in Spectrum where they place routers. This allows them to see the exact topology of the network and quickly find solutions in case of network failures.

Integrations with DX Spectrum:

We use Spectrum for network analysis, failure detection, and sending information to our service management tool. We also use other Broadcom products like CA Performance Management (CAPM) and SOI (Service Operations Insight). Additionally, we are currently rolling out Dynatrace for application performance monitoring.

The integration capabilities of DX Spectrum are good and not difficult to implement.

We haven't measured the return on investment (ROI) for DX Spectrum. However, it has helped reduce manual work and automate processes, especially in error detection and forwarding information to the service management tool. Our organization is streamlined, with fewer people in the control center, due to the automation of these processes.

We are a customer of Broadcom, we use a group license that covers various CA products, including DX Spectrum. The company purchases the licenses they need from this group license, and we do not have a direct contract with Broadcom.

Spectrum is expensive.

Overall, I am satisfied with the features Spectrum offers. I think it has all the necessary features.

I would definitely recommend buying DX Spectrum. It is a very good product, and I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The product helps to correlate events. 

The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.

DX Spectrum needs better documentation on its complex features. 

I have been using the product since 2005. 

I rate DX Spectrum's stability an eight point five out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a nine out of ten. 

The tool's setup is simple. 

We have seen ROI since it saves time and money. 

DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable. 

DX Spectrum adapts to emerging technologies. It is an all-inclusive suite that includes performance. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

Network monitoring is the most important reason for using it. It is deployed on-prem in our data center.

The visualization of the network topology is very good. The network operation guys get a much better understanding of the topology of the network. When something fails, it is easy to see who are the neighbors of the devices and what is impacted. This respective correlation is very helpful in limiting or pinpointing a problem.

The capability of handling and monitoring with SNMP and working with the SNMP traps is much better than other products.

There should be better integration with other Broadcom products, like network performance manager. Currently, for every part of a product, you need a separate server environment. You have something for Spectrum, you have something for network performance, and you have something for NetFlow. There are a lot of islands and server farms with different technologies. They should be redeveloped to get one platform for all.

I have been using DX Spectrum for 20 years.

It is stable now. Over 20 years, we have seen a lot of crazy bugs, but in the last two or three years, there are no critical bugs there.

It is absolutely scalable. It scales very well. We have more than 50,000 devices for one of our customers. It is very easy.

In terms of our environment, servers are deployed in two data centers. Our environment is divided. We have a central server farm, which is split up for our customers. So, we are sharing one Spectrum instance with multiple customers. Our customers are medium to large enterprises.

It changed a lot of times. It depends on the people who are working there. It depends on the person on the other side. For example, if you are routed to India, you could have some problems with the quality.

Neutral

We had NetView from IBM. We switched over to DX Spectrum because we were just flooded with events, and we had no idea about the root cause of the event. We tested the other solutions at this time, like HPO View, but they never gave us the view that we have in Spectrum now in terms of pinpointing where the problem is.

It's a bit too complex right now. From the point of DX Spectrum, you have to implement a lot of server components. It should be easier because a lot of automation is possible today in the market.

If everything is already prepared, you just need one day to deploy it. It doesn't take so much time. The implementation strategy depends on the customer or data center environment and the processes. With preparation, it takes about one month.

In terms of the staff required, you need just one person for the Spectrum piece, but of course, you need a few people for preparing the network, firewall rules, and things like that.

In terms of maintenance, the maintenance is that you have to keep it up to date. Other than that, there is not so much to do.

We see an ROI in the operational cost. We have a lot of automation behind the events coming in, and the operators get a very key understanding of what's happening. So, there is our return on investment. Our operations people are much faster in reacting to and solving problems.

Since the acquisition by Broadcom, we have not had such a good experience with licensing and pricing. Since they were bought by Broadcom, every sales contract is getting complicated. It's very complicated, and it's much more expensive than before. It's not a good pricing strategy from Broadcom.

I would absolutely recommend it, but it's not so easy to learn. It's not geared toward self-learning. It's a good idea to have a Spectrum partner.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

DX Spectrum is used in our data center.

The solution notifies you of any type of network equipment, such as switches, or routers, that are down. It lets you know right away on a list of red critical alerts.

As long as you have your devices configured properly on your networks, such as switches or routers, then you're going to receive the alerts.

DX Spectrum has helped out our organization keep us aware of anything that's down and overall visibility. The previous package of software that we had was not the best, DX Spectrum is an improvement because sometimes we wouldn't get any notifications at all, and now we receive much everything.

The most valuable features of DX Spectrum are the comprehensive alerts.

I have been using DX Spectrum for approximately 10 years.

DX Spectrum is stable. However, now and then there are some issues, but overall it is good.

The scalability of DX Spectrum is good. We haven't hit any limitations, it will scale up even if we double our network we wouldn't have an issue.

We have a couple of people who use the solution for monitoring. We have approximately 60 people using the networks and servers.

The number of devices we monitor with DX Spectrum will increase, and the number of people using them will increase.

I have not contacted technical support. My administration has had interactions with them.

 We previously used HP OpenView, but DX Spectrum is more comprehensive.

I did not set up DX Spectrum, but it does seem complex if you dive deep into it.

We implementation of DX Spectrum in-house. 

DX Spectrum is a solid solution. There's always improve room for improvement with solutions. DX Spectrum does what we need to do so I think we're happy with it.

I rate DX Spectrum a nine out of ten.

It's primarily a fault management tool.

An organization using DX Spectrum is more easily able to understand the root cause when something happens in its environment. The tool gives you the ability to correlate all the alarms from different devices and areas. You can pull the information together and you have a really good picture of what might have caused the problem, and what you can do to prevent it from happening the next time. That's a huge benefit. 

It also reduces the amount of time it takes to troubleshoot a problem.

The Global Collections are what I found to be most valuable. With the Global Collections, you're able to organize and categorize devices into "folders," or functional groups and categories, so that it doesn't matter which SpectroSERVER those devices are on.

In this tool, there's a distributed setup and you can have multiple SpectroSERVERs. Normally the devices that are on a SpectroSERVER are local to that SpectroSERVER. But with the OneClick Console and the Global Collections concept, you can take devices from any SpectroSERVER and put them in a group. You're then able to manage those devices from the Global Collections, which span across your SpectroSERVERs. That's one of the most valuable features of the tool because it allows for really efficient management of your devices, especially in a really large distributed environment.

Another really good feature is what's called SANM, the Spectrum Alarm Notification Manager. It allows you to produce notifications based on certain things that are happening. Each SANM notification runs as its own individual process. If one SANM notification stopped working for some reason, it wouldn't affect all the other ones. That's a really good feature as well.

One thing I would like to see improved is that it doesn't really allow for multi-tenancy. If you're an ISP or an MSP and you want to use this tool to provide these types of fault management services to your customers, you would need a separate SpectroSERVER for each customer, and probably a separate OneClick Console. You would almost need a separate instance of the tool running for each customer. Whereas other tools have multi-tenancy built-in, out-of-the-box, and you can stand up one instance of the tool. They should definitely try to change that to make it multi-tenancy-friendly because it's not at all.

They could also improve how events are managed and correlated in the system. They need to make event management and correlation something that works from a group perspective, versus having to go into all these files and manipulate certain portions of a file to effectively manage events. That should be something that comes through in an interface.

I started using DX Spectrum around 2007 or 2008. That's when I took my first Spectrum DX class. At that time, it was version 8.1.

My first time using it was as a consultant for a pretty large consulting company. I set the tool up for different organizations and businesses. That included installing the tool and discovering devices in that company's network, and then organizing those devices into Global Collections, organizing the maps. I also ensured that they were able to see all of the alarms on the OneClick Console, alarms that they needed to manage their devices effectively. I would also optimize all of the alarms and all of the company's data and resources so that they were not being overwhelmed with alarms.

It's a very stable and mature tool. It's been around for a long time and has gone through all the changes the industry has gone through. It's rock-solid. I don't recall any bugs that prevented the use of the product.

It's not easily scalable. To scale out, you have to install more SpectroSERVERs in the environment. That connects to the multi-tenancy topic. I wouldn't consider it the easiest product to scale out. That monolithic-type architecture is prevalent in legacy-type applications. That makes it difficult to scale, especially in today's environment.

It is used across multiple locations, departments, and teams. It really depends on how a client wants to deploy their SpectroSERVERs and where they want to put them. The environment depends on who is using the solution and how big their deployment is. But you could have hundreds of users in the system. I'm not even sure if there's a limit on that. Most companies did have a lot of users. They were pretty much all enterprise-level.

The tech support was really good. It depends on who you get, but most of the tech support people I worked with were pretty sharp and would help you resolve the problem pretty quickly.

Positive

I did use a performance and fault management tool, but that is a really old solution. It was a tool built by a consulting company called INS, going back to the early 2000s possibly.

Another tool I used was something called Infovista, which is a suite of tools, so it has more than just fault management. It was primarily for performance management.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. You have to know all the steps, obviously, but I can do it in my sleep now.

To install it and get it fully functional takes about a week. That sounds like a long time, but the optimization piece is what really takes the longest. To get it installed and have some of the basic, out-of-the-box stuff working would take a day or two days. The optimization piece could take anywhere from three or four days to two weeks, depending on what the customer wants to see. 

Clients would normally go with a OneClick Console and three primary SpectroSERVERs and then three backup SpectroSERVERs. Each of the primary and secondary pairs works in tandem. They communicate with each other.

Each SpectroSERVER pair can be thought of as a separate entity. Within each pair, they work together, such that the primary does the data collection, correlation, and polling. It sends its information over to the secondary and that's happening with each of the three pairs of SpectroSERVERs. 

The primaries are also sending your data over to the OneClick server. The latter has the ability to see all three of the devices and correlate things. The OneClick Console can be thought of as your web front-end, and then the SpectroSERVERs are like your database and polling layer. 

The number of SpectroSERVERs really depends on the size of the environment and what you want to monitor.

About 90 to 95 percent of my deployments were on-prem hardware servers. It then went to being on VMware virtualized boxes. Now, most of them are using cloud-based systems. The SpectroSERVERs are in the cloud.

Most of the companies using the solution have two, three, or four data centers with a SpectroSERVER pair in each data center. Or it might be set up with a primary SpectroSERVER in data center A, data center B, and data center C, but with the secondary for A in B, the secondary for B in C, and the secondary for C in A. That way, if a data center goes down, you still have some functionality for multiple SpectroSERVERs in different data centers.

Because SpectroSERVERs talk to devices, you want to keep them as close to the devices as possible, in that particular data center. You don't really want to do polling, monitoring, and management across wide area network connections. 

In terms of how departments manage the information, that's where Global Collections come in. You can make them either departmental or functional, et cetera.

In terms of maintenance, backups are done on a daily basis and that is something that has to be maintained. Replication between the SpectroSERVERs is something that needs to be maintained as well. There's a fair amount of maintenance that needs to be done on the product, but it's not to the point where you can't do anything else.

All our clients have definitely seen ROI. Although I haven't gotten specific information on that from customers, I would imagine that ROI comes because the time it takes to understand and resolve issues and get back to a fully functional state, is reduced significantly through the use of DX Spectrum.

I would definitely recommend it. With any tool, you want to do a proof of concept, but it's a great tool for fault management. Also, understand the caveats: that it's not the most scalable tool and it's not very multi-tenant friendly. Aside from that, it's rock-solid in terms of how it does fault management. That's something that you really can't beat.

In my mind, Spectrum DX was the number one fault management in the market for many years. Now, with everything moving back to the cloud, I don't know where it stands.

I use the solution for monitoring and configuration management. 

The tool is very mature, and its valuable features are monitoring and configuration management. 

From a functionality perspective, the product is not doing what it should. Also, there are some concerns about the accessibility. I would appreciate additional out-of-the-box troubleshooting scripts, like templates for addressing various issues. Currently, when troubleshooting online, I need to create my scripts. It would be beneficial if the platform could provide pre-built scripts or templates to help automate certain troubleshooting tasks.

I have been using the product for eight years. 

I rate DX Spectrum's stability a ten out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten. I can scale it for hundreds and thousands of users easily. 

DX Spectrum's technical support is good and responsive. 

I have used OpenText before DX Spectrum. 

I can complete DX Spectrum's deployment in two hours. 

DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap. 

I have my own script to analyze the data and perform actions in the backend, like repairing a configuration. I rate DX Spectrum a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for monitoring the network device. We have to configure the alert management and integrate it with Zabbix.

It's a good tool. It's simple to do the configuration. It has good discovery and integration.

It would be helpful to have a business layer and the possibility to integrate with information like the location and business structure. It's difficult to analyze and configure. It's not a very smart tool. It's a little old, and there are other tools that are more efficient.

From my point of view, the problem isn't the single tool itself because Spectrum and Zabbix are vertical tools for specific devices. So, Spectrum is vertical on a network. The problem is to have a correlation with the infrastructure layer, network layer, and business layer. In my experience, the client wants to see the business service.

The business service works fine, but when there is a problem on the business layer – for example, the web service or CRM process flow – it's difficult to correlate the business issues with infrastructure issues.

Now there are many APM monitoring tools. We have the artificial intelligence to correlate different alerts, aggregate alerts and give them to the client as a head-to-end picture. The problem with Spectrum is they still require effort to create the report to extract the configuration. This is a big limitation.

I would suggest improving the web GUI to improve the device monitor configuration and to improve or to integrate the new tool for reporting. For example, it can be helpful to integrate with a tool like Grafana or another dashboard to have a layer for the reporting.

I have used this solution for one year.

It's stable.

It's scalable, but in the future, the client will want to replace this tool with a different solution.

We have an internal process. When the network team asks to deliver a new network device, they have accounts and administrator privileges to take charge of all the specs for the new network device. We have to manage and check the tool. We have to configure the new alert and the new integration with Zabbix. The discovery is generally managed directly from the network team.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.