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DX Spectrum vs Fortra's Intermapper comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 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 Network Monitoring Software
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (8th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), Network Troubleshooting (6th), DX NetOps (1st)
Fortra's Intermapper
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
80th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of DX Spectrum is 1.6%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's Intermapper is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
DX Spectrum1.6%
Fortra's Intermapper0.5%
Other97.9%
Network Monitoring Software
 

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.
AL
SVP of Networking and Operations at Skywire Networks
It tremendously cuts down our troubleshooting timeframe, but needs advanced SLA monitoring and reporting
They can do a better job with SLA reporting. It does some basic reporting, but it really doesn't offer the ability to monitor devices by groups, customers, or carrier to give an overall health performance of specifically-defined environments. That's where HelpSystems Intermapper could have done a better job. I would love to see advanced SLA monitoring and reporting in this solution. They already have a lot of ingredients. They already have SNMP polling. It is really about what people are looking for from SLA monitoring, especially someone who looks at the network topology. You want to see your endpoints. You want to see half of your endpoints by simply analyzing ICMP or SNMP-based availability of your endpoints. Having an ability to define your group and how you bring devices into your group would be a huge benefit.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The fact that I don't have to sit and watch things; they get monitored, and then I hear about them and take care of them as needed."
"I found Spectrum as being a complete network management solution with a great user friendly GUI."
"I can use it to detect whenever things go wrong on my network."
"Spectrum is designed for large infrastructures, anything less than 4000 devices and it is probably a waste of money"
"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."
"It's a good tool; it's simple to do the configuration and has good discovery and integration."
"The support we have been receiving has been really good."
"This is a very stable product and helps us to be proactive and prevents the company from losing money and business by monitoring the entire network (data and voice) of the company (head office and branches) in real time, showing exactly where errors occur."
"It's a nice graphical interface, a nice map, that relates Layer 1 to Layer 3, virtually instantly, to the Helpdesk support staff. It provides a default place to get critical information so we can deploy our staff."
"It's all today portal-based which is a good feature for us."
"The most valuable features are its: log history, real-time monitoring capabilities, accuracy - the number of false positives is very low, and the mapping features."
"What is really cool about HelpSystems InterMapper is that because of its SNMP base, you can integrate all different makes and models on the same map. You, of course, can have more than one map, but you have an option to have visibility into the entire network from one centralized system. You can monitor IPs, routers, radios, DC power plants, and UPS. You can do it all from one network management and monitoring solution. That's what really makes HelpSystems Intermapper great. Another great thing about HelpSystems InterMapper is that you can really bundle different probes under one device. You can have a bundled device. You can monitor the physical status of a host based on the IP availability. You can also monitor services and actually see if anything happens. You can quickly determine whether it is the application layer, host layer, or network layer. HelpSystems Intermapper gives such a unique representation of a network. Ever since we started using HelpSystems InterMapper, we don't have to document everything in a detailed format and store it somewhere. Right now, it is really a combination of network topology, network monitoring, and network analyzing. So, in my opinion, it is awesome. When you have your SNMP topology defined, you don't require a dedicated NMS engineer to manage your system, which is another great thing about HelpSystems InterMapper. I see how our operators get so excited by having the ability to map a device or interface and connect interfaces together. HelpSystems InterMapper is also very operator friendly; not just user friendly, but also operator friendly. This is a unique feature, and it works really great."
"Put Intermapper in as your base to start from, hands-down."
"Right now, it is really a combination of network topology, network monitoring, and network analyzing, so, in my opinion, it is awesome."
"The graphical alerting with the ability to obtain a quick overview of a monitored device is my favorite feature."
"The solution has a couple of features which are really interesting; it's not a fancy or expensive solution but we wanted to have a cost effective one and it's doing its job pretty well."
 

Cons

"For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts."
"A lot of the filtering and orchestration of the background takes a lot of manual work."
"Customer Service: It's poor. Technical Support: It's poor."
"The biggest problem we had with it at the beginning was just the Java console."
"Today with Spectrum we work in a reactive way where we notice problems after they occur."
"Our consultant was four months on-site doing Spectrum setup and working through issues."
"I’d like to see better access to data elements via the API as well as better elements for the UIs."
"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."
"I'd love to see more of the network management side of it coming back into it. If we were able to run scripts to bounce ports on switches, that would be great. It's asking a lot, but it's actually very doable because I do it through scripting into other products. If we could incorporate that directly into Intermapper, that would be fantastic."
"They can do a better job with SLA reporting. It does some basic reporting, but it really doesn't offer the ability to monitor devices by groups, customers, or carrier to give an overall health performance of specifically-defined environments. That's where HelpSystems Intermapper could have done a better job. I would love to see advanced SLA monitoring and reporting in this solution. They already have a lot of ingredients. They already have SNMP polling. It is really about what people are looking for from SLA monitoring, especially someone who looks at the network topology. You want to see your endpoints. You want to see half of your endpoints by simply analyzing ICMP or SNMP-based availability of your endpoints. Having an ability to define your group and how you bring devices into your group would be a huge benefit."
"It's a smaller solution so tools are not as advanced as you would find in a larger solution"
"I have seen instances where Intermapper does not seem to recover from network changes."
"I'd love to see more of the network management side of it coming back into it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"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 price of the solution is reasonable."
"The price is very high."
"DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Government
16%
Construction Company
12%
University
7%
Recreational Facilities/Services Company
7%
 

Company Size

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

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...
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Also Known As

CA Spectrum
HelpSystems Intermapper
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Greater Media Detroit, University of British Columbia, Don's Farm Supply
Find out what your peers are saying about DX Spectrum vs. Fortra's Intermapper and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,051 professionals have used our research since 2012.