DX Spectrum Reviews

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.

Monitoring window, graphical representation of devices, automatic updating of databases, high scalability, high robustness, and user-friendly options are some of the most valuable features for us.

It can be made to operate on a cloud with load balancing capabilities which doesn't occupy much memory. The application can be modeled to support users from different teams to intercommunicate.

CA Spectrum is an important tool for our organization in that it manages loads of server capacity in a single platform and deploys different kinds of windows for device management, database storage, graphical representation of devices, and highlights fail-overs in realtime.

While deploying the tool, there were space and storage issues since the application loads for a long period each time there is an update.

I have used this solution for about 2 years.

There were long loading periods during deployment.

A device can't be 100% stable and robust. However, CA Spectrum is one of the most stable systems to handle at medium to high-level operations.

The tool is designed to enhance operational scalability, and hence it was updated according to the customer and market needs.

Customers have found the tool really useful because it is user friendly and lets them to login to their devices manually to check the health of any site.

I would give an eight out of ten for their level of technical expertise with reference to this application. They have been amazing in their service.

It was the first ever solution I tried and it worked so I never had a chance to work on other solutions. This applications works best on medium to large-sized organizations.

The initial setup was to download and install the software, which takes a few minutes for installation. It is a straightforward process and is not rocket science.

The initial implementation was through a vendor and I would rate them 8 out of 10. The vendor management team has a very good technical expertise .

Return on Investment matters are known mostly to management and in my experience it is found to be effective. ROI provides a profitability ratio.

It's a licensed software and internationally certified. It is priced at a median level for any organization to start using the software and tool.

I did not try any other option. It was my first ever option and it worked. The application is well-suited for network monitoring.

I would advise any engineer to use the application because it is user friendly and secure. I would recommend any organization that requires network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities all in a single platform.

There are many feature which are really good for business, and a few among them are

• Fault isolation which helps to control the unnecessary flood of alerts
• NCM (Network Configuration Manager) - To capture the configuration backup of the network, devices which have out of box features for Cisco devices
• Out of box integration with other CA products like Nimsoft(UIM), APM, eHealth to provide CA as a complete solution in the environment
• Integration with Service desk (ITSM) tool for ticket automation in an environment
• Integration with 3rd party tools as it can receive the traps and then can be converted into meaningful alarms.
• Ability to import MIB"s for different Vendor devices.

It has really helped to create a complete solution so that clients can see their whole IT network in one complete console/solution.

CA keeps on enhancing the product time to time, taking enhancements from users like us, as we make maximum use of their products.

I think they should improve or add advance performance reporting in the reporting part of Spectrum, they have recently replaced CABI with Jaspersoft in new version as a reporting integration.

I've used it for four years.

No issues with deployment for me as i have been deploying/upgrading this product frequently for different clients.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Great, we try to resolve issues of our own, but when required CA support is well versed in technical expertise and documentation to help their clients.

4.5 out of 5

No, I have been using CA products for almost 4 years now.

It's a bit complex on Linux box but straight forward for windows, but you need some hands-on experience to start on production.

In-house.

Read the documentation first before implementing, CA has a very well managed documentation and also good articles on their KB support site for known issues.

There are several features that are valuable:

1. Fault management of different devices from various vendors;
2. Integration with different application from other vendors is supported; and
3. Various features to configure/customize/scale as per business requirements.

1. It has a highly scalable architecture that is designed to ensure accommodation of the growing network setup for our client.
2. The improvised fault management reduces the time to detect faults and to get required teams to address issues by email or ticket.

The documentation of this product is not very easy to understand without any screenshots or application windows.

It's also expensive for the company.

I've used it for five years now.

If prerequisites are followed, there will not be major challenges during deployment.

In case there is/are any problems during deployment, CA has 24x7 support.

If database size is large and any corruption occurs, it takes a considerably large time to fix the issue.

We've had no issues with scalability.

I'd rate customer service 8/10.

I'd rate technical support 8/10.

We did not use a previous solution.

We implemented it through a vendor team. I'd rate them 9/10.

It's worth investing in if monitoring of critical assets is a priority for your organization.

It is the perfect monitoring solution for customers' devices. Searching and locating of the reported device is very easy. The Discovery option is very great and fast solution to model a very huge network and also small networks.

It has improved our reaction time for incident management.

ITIL -

• Incident management
• Automation
• Connection between Spectrum and some standardized incident tools

Currently I have been working with this product for five years

Not really. Every tool has some strong and weak areas and they need to be tuned up from the beginning.For this we have the vendor support.

No, I don't think so. Every unstable state has been caused by an incorrect configuration, by overloading, or by hardware failure.

It is a network infrastructure management software for device monitoring. I didn't meet with issues regarding the scalability as everything could be set up or configured.

8/10 as I am well informed about any changes with the software or training as I am a technician.

7-8/10 but sometimes I think that technical support could be more flexible.

No, I didn't use a different solution. I just have some skills with other umbrella tools, where I was able to see a behaviour and processes which are needed for operation.

It's hard to say as every time it is a big challenge to implement any kind of the tool on our systems or improve them once in production. During the whole process we are faced with many more different situations. For this reason we have a testing environment. After the initial setup in the testing environment is complete, we are able to proceed onto the production process which is easier to do because because of the experience in the test environment.

Yes, the first time we have implemented it we used our vendors support, and I am rating the person as 10/10 as they performed an excellent job!

I see many advantages for using this software except if you need it as a home solution.

When I started many years ago with the Spectrum, we did an initial screen of the application with a picture of my ca, Means the customization is possible with many ways.

The most valuable feature for us is that we can model a large variety of devices and receive SNMP traps from them.

It allows us to respond to network events, and we have a surveillance department that monitors all these inbound reports and we can get people dispatched right away.

A lot of things are internal development, like we'll have a network alert and we've got it configured so that it can open a trouble ticket and service management system. You know, a lot of features like that are the ones that we can develop internally without necessarily having it added to the software release, but it would be nice to have it added nevertheless.

Not really on the CA site itself. We may have put under-powered servers running the application or things like that and those are some issues that we're working on internally to actually make it supported by CA. A lot of it really has to do with how much time you invest in setting it up and having the right hardware.

I haven't personally called them.

I didn't do the initial setup as far as installing the application. I've done a lot of tweaking of views of what the user should see and things like that and that's not difficult.

It's really tough to say because it really does have a lot to do with how much time you put into it. If we had a crew that just completely dialed in everything and set it up, had the right hardware, it's kind of a totally different question than if, internally, you developed it on unsupported hardware, didn't spend much time setting it up.

We've had a few previous competitors over the years that I've worked with the company. Spectrum can do SNMP inquiries and alert you that a device is totally unreachable. With some of our previous platforms it was a one way process.

Go for it. Try the best you can to start out fully within specifications and that kind of thing. We're going back and fixing all that now, which we might not have had to.

For me, as a deployment person and support person for the product, the most valuable feature is the scalability of the product. We started out with a fairly ambitious goal of managing about ten thousand devices. That over a couple of years became about one hundred thousand devices. Without completely crashing our original architecture, we were able to scale up to meet that requirement rather easily by just horizontally adding more servers.

It met a really critical need inside of my company because just before I was hired, they had about a two-day outage in one of their data centers. They didn't really understand the scope of the outage because they lacked in their existing monitoring environment the ability to see the topology of the network. They thought they were fixing the problem over here for a couple of days until they finally realized, oops, they probably really made it worse. So that is one of the key things that Spectrum brings to the table, that ability to do vault isolation, and alarm suppression, and more quickly find and focus on the area that needs to be fixed.

A big problem for us now is the Java requirement for the console. It really should be using HTML5. Our personnel use a multitude of enterprise and network management tools, each of them with different Java requirements. They, as cleverly as they can, have devised a means of trying to make those things sort of work and play nicely together on their glass. But it's an issue. Every time we do an upgrade, the Java version changes for Spectrum.

The new web client is a fairly basic sort of operator-level solution at this point, but it's going to expand into a full-blown one at some point. One of the questions that I'll have for product manager is, what's the timeline for replacing Java?

From time to time we have issues with Spectrum. When we do, they are generally easy to recover from. I am very impressed with the stability of this product. I've been doing network management tools a long time and I know of what I speak.

In Spectrum, the concept is really two tiered. It's a solution with a web client application. Initially, we had nine servers doing the polling and, I think, two one-click servers serving the buoy. Then management came to us and said we need to do a whole other part of the enterprise, so add another nine servers. We just quickly added them and pointed them to the devices and the main location server, which is the one that ties all of the polars together. As more users were added, we just added more one-click servers.

I think we are one of the larger Spectrum deployments in the western hemisphere. There are some things we would like to request for product enhancements in terms of supporting a horizontally-scaled set of one-click servers.

I was very excited to see the presentation yesterday that told us where they think the product is, where it's going, and we are going to hear more of that today with the roadmap presentation. Things are looking very good.

It has been very, very good. We sometimes have to more carefully explain our problem to the person that is assigned to us. But once we get that fully understood, we quickly get the right focus. I have been very impressed a number of times with the quality of the person on the other end of the phone. They've actually helped us with some things beyond the actual current problem when they've taken a look at our system and said, oh by the way, do this or do that. It has been very good.

Installations went smoothly. Customizations were pretty straightforward.

If you like to sleep at night and not be disturbed on the weekends, get Spectrum. It's a really robust, mature product, but still with newer and newer features being added, and it's very, very stable.