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DX Spectrum vs Grafana Enterprise Stack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

DX Spectrum
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
20th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (8th), Network Monitoring Software (21st), Network Troubleshooting (6th), DX NetOps (1st)
Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
13th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of DX Spectrum is 1.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Grafana Enterprise Stack0.9%
DX Spectrum1.7%
Other97.4%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

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.
RM
Test Lead at Calpine Group
Efficient monitoring and alerting enhance operational insights
With Grafana Enterprise Stack, we can identify issues that New Relic cannot help with. While New Relic requires purchase and supports frontend and backend components, Grafana Enterprise Stack helps identify where issues are occurring. When we need to deep dive into issues, we use New Relic to trace transactions and determine where maximum impact occurs, whether in core size, DB side, or frontend components that slow performance. We first evaluate with Grafana Enterprise Stack, then move to New Relic if we identify performance degradation, such as DB queries taking too much time. Grafana Enterprise Stack responds to queries within 6 to 12 hours. They contact users through email immediately when available. Similarly, New Relic follows the same pattern, responding immediately when requests are raised and resolving issues promptly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Scalability and performance are great."
"The great aspect about the CA Spectrum tool is not what it does, but the integration that it provides with the other CA monitoring tools, such as CA APM."
"Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing."
"The event management that the tool provides is extremely powerful, but with that comes a bit of complexity."
"CA Spectrum is awesome for networks, but when paired with CA UIM, you can have everything: datacenter, networks, virtualization and on."
"All networks (or network equipment) are monitored through CA Spectrum."
"The alarm and root cause analysis features are the most valuable to me, as they help to pinpoint causes of outages and performance issues and identify the specific component responsible for an issue, thus accelerating problem and issue resolution."
"​Stability has been good. We really have not had any issues.​"
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"It is very easy to deploy and integrate with any application or infrastructure layer."
"Our productivity has improved with its use."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"It is truly reliable."
"Grafana has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."
 

Cons

"I switched from Spectrum to Nimsoft because it's a better product for me."
"A better integration with the UIM, as far as being able to do root cause analysis and that type of analytics."
"We have had some issues with the spec server and the high availability replication of data. It fails over well, but it does not come back very well. We get duplicated events."
"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."
"CA Broadcom support is very bad—one of the worst."
"We have a lot of different monitoring tools in the background, so orchestration has been a little bit of a challenge."
"DX Spectrum could be improved by them getting rid of the Java console."
"A lot of the filtering and orchestration of the background takes a lot of manual work."
"I find Grafana really hard to configure. It's difficult to build the dashboard, and it's non-intuitive. In my opinion, it's very difficult to work with Grafana."
"If Grafana Enterprise Stack could display transaction queries in dashboard format similar to New Relic, it would provide more options and capabilities for users."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
"Grafana Enterprise Stack is complex and not easy or simple."
"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable."
"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 solution's pricing could be better."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"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."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"I use the tool's free license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise90
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I am trying to think about its advanced alerting features; we do not use it too much for that. We do get it to report through to our help desk system and if a threshold gets broken, then a ticket i...
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I have switched to a different suite, focusing on customer edge solutions that are mostly Fortinet. To manage it, I use Grafana Enterprise Stack and a whole bunch of tools that we wrote ourselves. ...
What advice do you have for others considering Grafana Enterprise Stack?
We use Grafana Enterprise Stack in all of our clients. I rate this product an eight out of ten.
 

Also Known As

CA Spectrum
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
1. Uber 2. PayPal 3. eBay 4. Sony 5. Red Hat 6. IBM 7. Cisco 8. Adobe 9. Expedia 10. Booking.com 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Spotify 16. Pinterest 17. Slack 18. GitLab 19. Docker 20. Atlassian 21. Salesforce 22. Microsoft 23. Google 24. Amazon 25. Facebook 26. Apple 27. Intel 28. Oracle 29. SAP 30. VMware 31. HP 32. Dell
Find out what your peers are saying about DX Spectrum vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.