DX Spectrum Reviews

• Works excellent for heterogeneous networks (lots of different vendors)
• Error correlation
• Root-cause analysis
• Service intelligence
• Lots of add-on products for Spectrum, e.g., VMware integration
• Local extensions/developments for special needs, e.g., new vendor xyz

With the object-oriented design of Spectrum, from its very first version, we had very important issues, such as fault isolation and root-cause analysis implemented by default!! Which means that we had through all these years very precise fault indications on where to look for the error and were not overwhelmed by long lists of alarm, which were only effects of the real fault.

So we then concentrated on building a virtual picture of the complete real IT infrastructure inside Spectrum. This includes today a very wide range of devices, which are modelled inside Spectrum and interconnected in the correct hierarchy as in the real environment. And, as the big buzzword today is IoT, this means for us as a service provider to our university users to deal with MoT = Monitoring of Things!!

The “new” things include devices such as coffee machines, fridges, temperature sensors, worktime badge systems, door opening scanners, house automation systems (for light, sun blinds, climate, etc.), smoke and fire detectors, etc. This list increases every year with new “things” popping up on our network radar!

Of course, the real IT devices like routers, switches, firewalls, servers, storage devices, WiFi access points, IP phones, and, importantly, printers, form the base of the big “virtual” Spectrum picture.

And last but not least, Spectrum by design can be expanded in its function by a series of add-ons, such as VMware integration, which reads out automatically the virtual servers in the vCenter and models all VM’s inside Spectrum in the corresponding physical servers. Another example of an add-on is the integration of a performance probe with scenarios that run periodically (i.e., log in to a webmail portal, check for the existance of a message xyz, lookup the calendar, etc.) and map those scenarios to objects within Spectrum, which can be handled like devices, so you can put thresholds on them and get alarmed when violated!

Thanks to Spectrum, we are able to monitor (and send out alarms for) our whole IT infrastructure 7/24 without having more than a minimal number of technical persons.

• Reporting
• Full web-based topology view
• Path view

I have used it since fall 1990. We’re a simple - but extremely long-term customer.

I only encountered stability issues in very rare situations; mainly when we used our own extensions for private management modules.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far!

Technical support is excellent - 9.5 on a scale 0-10 - but this also includes support from the local Spectrum partner here in Switzerland.

I did not previously use a different solution. At the time (fall 1990), there were only very few products available, where just two or three of them had a graphical visualization.

Initial setup was completely straightforward, as the product already included a discovery and an auto-connect function.

Start small and include as much of your IT infrastructure as possible, so that at the end you have a picture of the “big” total.

The product is rich in features, so a lot of them are valuable.

Network Configuration Manager - Backup network device configuration, enforce policies, enforce configuration and correlate configuration changes with network status. Also has an approval workflow for changes on devices.

Certification - You can certify devices in several levels. The most complex ones give you great results for your efforts, such as a certification using a Model Type Editor for a customized model type along with Event Admin to receive alerts from another source and redirect to your new models based on Name (this allows for creating virtual environments to monitor devices without IP if you have a manager with IP/SNMP for them) or IP, creating Dynamic Alarm Titles. This gives great value, because it becomes really easy for your operations team to know exactly what is happening by just looking at the alarm console, instead of searching for the problem in the alarm description.

Event Correlation - Great to map events and to correlate them before generating alarms. It works with event pairs, event count, event series and other methods; really useful.

Condition Correlation - Great for correlating alarm conditions with devices. For example, you have a router redundancy, and you don’t want two different alarms for Device Down. You can create a domain and rules to specify that if only both of the routers are down, it will generate a new alarm with the possibility to use whatever name you want for that new alarm.

Service Dashboard - This one is particularly great, because customers love it. It allows you to give them a service-oriented view of their infrastructure without having to use another tool for that. Because it’s part of CA Spectrum, the service is affected immediately after an alarm occurrence.

It allowed us to move from an open-source solution using six servers to an enterprise solution using two servers to monitor the same number of elements. Also, of course, the product offered a lot of features ready to use that we didn’t have before.

The Systems Performance Agent is powerful, but, for example, if you want to run a sql query and set a threshold against the returned value, you can’t directly. You need a script with the threshold set in the script and an exit different than zero (0) to generate an alarm. This is something that almost every monitoring solution on the market has built-in. CA UIM, for instance, does that really well. What you have ready to use is the ability to execute the query and get the value for how much time it took to execute.

I have used it since January 2009.

I have not encountered any stability issues so far.

I have not encountered any scalability issues so far.

Technical support is very good.

We previously used a different solution, and we switched mainly because the company needed scalability.

We were using Zabbix, a similar product, at the time, and we had a custom poller written in C and six servers to make it run. However, to get it past 12k elements (the break point for this solution), we would have to redo the entire file system using GFS from Red Hat to allow simultaneous write for a shared storage area. So, when we presented the project, the company realized it was time to invest in an enterprise solution. CA Spectrum was the winner after a series of tests and PoC process with the suppliers.

To install CA Spectrum and discover the network, it required half a day, back in 2008. Some of the competitors couldn’t complete the PoC after one week.

And CA Spectrum offered also a variety of OOTB features such as an easy certification process, VLAN discovery and other stuff.

Initial setup was very simple; as simple as Next - Next – Finish. The complex part isn’t the setup, but the planning (architecture and such).

Right now, it’s device based, so count what you have and estimate your total growth for at least one year. CA works on a trust-based method.

At the time we decided to switch from an open source to an enterprise solution, we evaluated HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, EMC Smarts.

Don’t try to do the planning without consulting a CA Partner or an expert. You will need help in other matters also; must have a good knowledge of SNMP protocol. Always read the documentation, which is very rich, and use the communities for extra help besides the support.

CA Spectrum is awesome for networks, but when paired with CA UIM, you can have everything: datacenter, networks, virtualization and on.

• Auto discovery helps us reduce manual efforts. CA Spectrum automatically discovers all network Cis, including LANs, WANs and all the connected assets and creates the actual topology view.
• Network configuration manager (NCM) help us configure capture. It helps detect unauthorized changes and delivers immediate notification.
• Root-case analysis (RCA) helps us correlate the symptoms and probable causes for the events. It helps the MTTR and save engineers’ efforts.

CA Spectrum helps our organization improve network service levels. With the help of Spectrum’s integrated automated fault management & fault isolation features, it helped us reduce MTTR by 50% and costs as well.

Reporting & network bandwidth monitoring features needs to be improved. When we generate the outage report, the alarm title does not appear correctly in the reports. Also, sometimes events are not synchronized and are missing from the reports.

Spectrum needs to include historical reports for network LAN/WAN performance utilization and bandwidth utilization.

I have been using it for eight years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

I did not encounter any stability issues. Spectrum has built-in fault tolerance options that helps us build a high-availability setup.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Customer service is 10/10.

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used lots of tools, such as PRTG and IBM Tivoli. CA Spectrum helped our organization automate fault management across multi-vendor and multi-technology infrastructure. Spectrum integration with service desk helped us reduce manual effort.

It was very easy to set up, install and configure Spectrum.

An in-house team implemented it.

Our ROI is 100%.

It's a very cost-effective tool. It is a device-based license.

We evaluated SolarWinds, NPM & Nagios before choosing this product.

The network monitoring features are the product’s most valuable, due to the lack of these capabilities in any other monitoring tool. No other application monitors networks as well as Spectrum.

Free tools are available to do what its other features do, such as server monitoring (CPU/memory/disk).

We are not using the latest version of the tool yet, but as far as I know, I think an improving reporting of data would be a good idea. The report area is very poor and we cannot work properly with additional information and the custom reports. We just use the default report for information that we have inside the database for these reports.

I've been working with this tool for eight years.

To be honest, Spectrum is one of the most stable and less problematic solutions that we work with. It’s easy to scale and to deploy. The only time we’ve had problems with it was with some upgrading processes. It is not so intuitive and you have to make sure everything is correct.

The CA support team is really capable and efficient when it comes to Spectrum. Most of the time they help us surprisingly fast and correctly.

I’ve worked with free tools such as Zabbix / Nagios. Right now, we only work with CA products and, as I’ve written, Spectrum is the way to go when you need networking monitoring.

Setting up general monitoring is straightforward. However, if you need something different than the standard setup, some customizations need to be done. Thus, it becomes more complex as a whole.

We have an ongoing vendor support team and we have an in-house one. For implementation advice, I would say to always plan your monitoring according to what you really need to monitor on your environment. Most of the problems we find today are related to operation process issues and not the tool at all. People have to know what they want before implementing the solution.

As I’ve written, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.

Auto discovery helps us reduce manual efforts. CA Spectrum automatically discovers all network Cis, including LANs, WANs and all the connected assets and creates the actual topology view.

Network configuration manager (NCM) help us configure capture. It helps detect unauthorized changes and delivers immediate notification.

Root-case analysis (RCA) helps us correlate the symptoms and probable causes for the events. It helps the MTTR and save engineers’ efforts.

CA Spectrum helps our organization improve network service levels. With the help of Spectrum’s integrated automated fault management & fault isolation features, it helped us reduce MTTR by 50% and costs as well.

Reporting and network bandwidth monitoring features needs to be improved. When we generate the outage report, the alarm title does not appear correctly in the reports. Also, sometimes events are not synchronized and are missing from the reports.

Spectrum needs to include historical reports for network LAN/WAN performance utilization and bandwidth utilization.

I have been using it for eight years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

I did not encounter any stability issues. Spectrum has built-in fault tolerance options that helps us build a high-availability setup.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Customer service is 10/10.

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used lots of tools, such as PRTG, IBM Tivoli, and SLMO. CA spectrum helped our organization automate fault management across multi-vendor and multi-technology infrastructure. Spectrum integration with service desk helped us reduce manual effort.

It was very easy to set up, install and configure Spectrum.

An in-house team implemented it.

Our ROI is 100%.

It's a very cost-effective tool.

It is a device-based license.

We evaluated SolarWinds NPM and Nagios before choosing this product.

The topology view, Global Collections and Fault Isolation algorithms pinpoint the exact point of failure.

It gives you a proactive approach. It is almost like it can foresee what's coming fault-wise speaking, and the key is the proprietary Inductive Modeling Technology that it has that gives it that edge ahead of other products.

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. Also, the Sizing tool is a bit old, and the last time I used it the CPU recommendations for our SpectroSERVERs given by the tool were Pentium IV. I can see that now there is an online updated tool that can assist with your design which is good.

I’ve been using it for almost eight years.

In earlier versions, the installations were a bit clunky and troublesome, but after v8 this improved dramatically, even installing large deployments were a breeze to do.

v6.6 had few hiccups, but in general it is a very mature product. It's been around since 1991 when it was owned by Cabletron.

When properly designed and you have your base installed, to scale it up or out is a walk in the park. You just need to introduce the new server, what role it has, and whether it's part of the FT environment and you’re done.

Pretty good. I must say, CA is an excellent company and their client always comes first. Every time I have worked with CA support, they were very insightful and had deep knowledge of the solution and how to tackle the issue.

Back in 2005, when I started working with Spectrum, the level of support engineers they had in the L2 was amazing! They provided deep knowledge and exact root cause solutions when I challenged them.

I tested different products before Spectrum. Tivoli was one of them, but it was too complicated and troublesome to configure and maintain. I didn’t like the interface of BMC Patrol as it wasn’t very intuitive, and HP OpenView was the same with a very unappealing GUI, and the algorithms used to keep track of changes in the network and root cause analysis very basic. I didn’t switch, it was only that I worked with these tools before working with Spectrum.

It’s not very complicated, just by following the manual guides were good enough to do a basic installation

It was an in-house implementation but I did training in America which helped me dramatically to fine tune the post-installation.

The pricing could be a bit steep if you are a mid-sized or small company, this is an enterprise product, designed and built for huge environments. Licensing used to be easy, and CA had a template depicting all the possible combinations for licensing, I don't know how easy it is nowadays.

Think big, and look to exploit all this product has to offer around Fault & Service Management. When I was the Enterprise Administrator in a big data center in South America, my motto was: if the coffee machine has a network card, we can monitor it and see if we are out of coffee. Spectrum is capable of doing this and more.

It provides several valuable features, including Spectrum Core, Report Manager, and VM Manager.

Our team has been able to maintain over 99% availability across the enterprise. 

We've also been able to proactively detect four major client-impacting outages over the past nine months.

I would like to see improvement in the ability of the user to configure the maintenance mode more efficiently.

We haven't had issues with deployment.

We haven't had issues with stability.

We haven't had issues with scalability.

I like the flexibility CA Spectrum offers to model networks with devices and different locations and technologies. 

It is easy to use and offers a lot out-of-the-box features (i.e. multi-vendor support, network discovery). 

If necessary there are also APIs to develop our own integrations.

Spectrum admins mostly enjoy having a powerful fault management platform which also lines up and integrates with the other software products they are using, i.e. trouble ticketing system and performance management solutions.

There is still room for improvement for mobile clients like tablets and smartphones. Most of the functionality can only be used with the Java client.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability. Especially with the latest release, the scalability was improved which allows support for huge networks with a small number of CA Spectrum servers.