No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

CA Application Delivery Analysis [EOL] vs DX Spectrum comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CA Application Delivery Ana...
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
DX Spectrum
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (8th), Network Monitoring Software (18th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (19th), Network Troubleshooting (7th), DX NetOps (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1237194 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Director, DevOps at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Good monitoring functionality, but technical support and integration with other products need to be improved
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.
PinchasAlbalya - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Monitoring has become centralized and management now sees real‑time health of key network assets
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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The pricing is relatively low compared to other solutions in this area, and I'd go so far as to say it's even significantly less than the competition."
"The most valuable feature is the fault management monitoring."
"Once it is setup and seeing traffic, it is an impressive tool to show potential problems long before the general users are complaining."
"Technical support is excellent."
"CA Spectrum helps our organization improve network service levels, and with Spectrum’s integrated automated fault management and fault isolation features, it helped us reduce MTTR by 50% and costs as well."
"DX Spectrum uses an SNMP Trap to accept all the details, especially for device monitoring of faulty devices, allowing me to use Spectrum effectively."
"The most valuable feature is automatic discovery."
"​It covers a lot of different types of hardware. It can do a lot and saves us time.​"
"Functionality of the tool is awesome and it is easy for customers to use."
"The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability."
"Spectrum is very useful for us, because the product lets us monitor and control all the various components of our infrastructure that support our business from an IT perspective."
"It gives an depth report of availability and outages, and by using it you can further analyze and find exactly where the bottlenecks lie."
 

Cons

"Upgrades can be quite complex."
"It is not the best product on the market, but it is better than the competition if you were comparing prices."
"My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances."
"The user interface needs improvement."
"Hard to setup right, hard to get the conversations right."
"It has a limitation in that it needed an old version of Java."
"The platform is complicated to use."
"DX Spectrum needs to incorporate faster support."
"Once something goes down, that is when we get alerted versus we need more predictive analytics in place so we know a case based on patterns putting AI in place, or something along those lines, so we know that there is a pattern growing that the systems going to go down."
"Our consultant was four months on-site doing Spectrum setup and working through issues."
"There's a little bit of complexity to the initial install because you're dealing with operating systems. You have to make sure all the prerequisites are done, anti-virus exceptions, etc. Then there's the bringing it up and then there's discovery of the network and setting that up. It takes time."
"CABI was a major issue for us, but the newly added Jaspersoft is a better-suited reporting toolset, so this has already been addressed."
"I would like to see a better, more simple web interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive solution and there is a single price to pay for licensing, with no options."
"In general, the license cost will be about 30% of the total TCO for this tool (hardware/support team, OS costs, and OS management)."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"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."
"The price is very high."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"The cost of some of these products are a little cost prohibitive, which is unfortunate. We have to find lower cost solutions for some of the things that we have to pull in. For the most part, CA has capabilities in pretty much everything that you would need. You just have to figure out where are you going to spend the most money for what you have to actually get done. You can do all these things but, which ones do you have to do? And that's hard to choose sometimes because you want to do them all."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Management Applications solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise90
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
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 to...
What is your primary use case for DX Spectrum?
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 Cisc...
 

Also Known As

CA ADA, Application Delivery Analysis, NetQoS SuperAgent
CA Spectrum
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ERGO
National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Fortinet, Skyline Communications and others in Network Management Applications. Updated: July 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.