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DX Spectrum vs Micro Focus Network Management Center [EOL] 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

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 (17th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), Network Troubleshooting (6th), DX NetOps (1st)
Micro Focus Network Managem...
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
it_user1040238 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at Fingerprint Consultancy
Monitors network devices, switches, and servers but the current dashboards need improvement
The only thing I can say needs improvement is in how they present the data to the end-users. End-users are looking for a dashboard with an attractive view. The current dashboards we have are sufficient for our needs, but not attractive for the business users at the upper management levels.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"This is a very powerful tool with a lot of functionality."
"The network monitoring features are the product’s most valuable, due to the lack of these capabilities in any other monitoring tool."
"For network management, this application is by far the best."
"With Spectrum, you have a complete insight into your entire infrastructure."
"This tool makes it more transparent to the customers, and they can be alerted and be proactive based on the data we are getting."
"We were able to clearly identify the root cause of incidents visually and with specimen alerts with the topology design."
"The performance manager is very good."
"We manage about one thousand network devices in our data center, and now we have visibility on all these network devices through this tool, which gives me immediate alerts or notifications when some devices fail and helps us to identify the root cause and fix it as fast as possible to keep the operation running smoothly."
 

Cons

"It does crash sometimes."
"DX Spectrum should have an automatic ticketing mechanism with ServiceNow. I need to use other tools for event management."
"OS monitoring needs to be better developed, as well as their services, e.g., cluster monitoring, URLs, etc."
"I would like to see CA move Spectrum, Performance Manager, and some of their other tools moved to a SaaS based model. You see a lot of other manufacturers which are moving toward SaaS based models."
"I did not see the best level of usability."
"I think the interface needs a bit of a revamp. They need to adapt it to the new app world that it is now ruling (iOS, Android Apps), and it needs to offer more."
"If nobody else has said the documentation needs improvement, let's go there. I understand, you can either write about it or you can do it. And most of us would rather they do it, but now that they've done it, those of us that didn't do it, we need to go and find: "Where did they write about this to tell us how to do it?" That's always lacking."
"We found the process of DX Spectrum down from time to time, and we need to interfere manually to restart."
"The only thing I can say needs improvement is in how they present the data to the end users. End users are looking for a dashboard with an attractive view. The current dashboards we have are sufficient for our needs, but not attractive for the business users at the upper management levels."
"The only thing I can say needs improvement is in how they present the data to the end-users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In general, the license cost will be about 30% of the total TCO for this tool (hardware/support team, OS costs, and OS management)."
"DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable."
"Currently, a perpetual license but some services are moving to a subscription"
"Spectrum is expensive."
"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 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 reasonable for the services and different products we have.Compared to others, it's reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
No data available
 

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
Network Management Center, HPE Network Management Center
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Retegal, KMC Technologies, NEC Australia
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, SolarWinds, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: June 2026.
902,456 professionals have used our research since 2012.