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DX Spectrum vs Riverbed SteelCentral WebAnalyzer [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 (18th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (19th), Network Troubleshooting (7th), DX NetOps (1st)
Riverbed SteelCentral WebAn...
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
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_user539928 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
I was able to monitor two key applications that were hosted externally.
WebAnalyzer includes support for Ajax transactions, while this is invaluable, it becomes difficult to provide a big picture analysis of pageviews AND ajax transactions. The APDEX score is calculated on pageview response times. Some applications use Ajax extensively to imitate desktop applications. This can be confusing if you only look at Pageview times.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The support we have been receiving has been really good."
"For us, within that technology area, it is the standard for solutions that we can select, and we haven't seen a better product."
"The main thing is obviously notifications about alerts, getting ahead of the curve to make sure that we do not have system going down, or if it is down we get to know it earlier."
"It helps our NetOps group actually handle alarms in a way that lets them see the bigger picture of those alarms, and how they might affect our services. It helps us communicate information about the network state better to services that might be impacted by a specific network condition."
"The performance manager is very good."
"CA Spectrum is a powerful solution that will allow you to do almost everything you ever needed to monitor your network infrastructure."
"If you like to sleep at night and not be disturbed on the weekends, get Spectrum."
"In deploying WebAnalyzer, I was able to monitor two key applications that were hosted externally."
 

Cons

"Most companies spend money on the license, but they don’t have a good administrator, to make use of all the good features, so they end up with a really expensive tool that does only the basic things, which any tool in the market could do probably better."
"OS monitoring needs to be better developed, as well as their services, e.g., cluster monitoring, URLs, etc."
"The price is high enough to expect an ideal solution."
"Sometimes the front-line people need to push it up to the second-level quicker."
"The Spectrum OneClick is a Java-based client, and that's aging. Really, before any new feature integration, I'd love to see a comprehensive rebuild of the UI."
"A lot of the filtering and orchestration of the background takes a lot of manual work."
"I think it still has room for improvement as far as the application, but support could also be improved."
"It took a while to understand the product, but once we went hands on, it's great to work with."
"Clients are manually installed. This makes mass deployments impossible."
 

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)."
"Spectrum is 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."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller."
"It is expensive compared to other tools in the market."
"DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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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Comparisons

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Also Known As

CA Spectrum
AppResponse BrowserMetrix
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
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