DX Spectrum Reviews

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.

With Spectrum, you have a complete insight into your entire infrastructure. You can look at your network system applications and pinpoint issues and problems for analysis. It's one of the premiere products that are out there.

It's beneficial because we can actually look at alarms and events. We can control those alarms and events, and provide them to our towers or silos. Also support -- it's an essential depository for traps, SSMP, network systems, and applications.

The OneClick MIB tools are a little complex, and I've seen other MIB tools that are a little simpler. I'm used to it, but I know if somebody's not familiar with it, it can be a little bit challenging. But overall, I have experience with it so I know what works and what doesn't work.

The stability of Spectrum is fine. We're just waiting on a new release to be put into play. We're excited about that because we're in 64-bit architecture, and the new release will be more stable and feature-rich. So, I'm really excited about delivering that to our program business unit’s infrastructure.

We can distribute it as far as we wish. I have no issues with Spectrum's scalability. I've seen it in multiple locations, including ours, where it's very stable.

9/10

I wasn't involved in any of the implementations that were put in there. I became the new caretaker in some ways, a shared investor in this solution.

I don't think you're going to go wrong with Spectrum. It's going to provide all of your needs and if you have to customize something in Spectrum, it's a customizable SMI, so it's very straight forward. You bring in all your events and you can integrate it with various other solutions.

Without a doubt the most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability. This is what Spectrum is known for and it's delivered on this for us.

It's also flexible and is able to manage all device types.

It gives us insight in to our overall network communication, and it has joined groups together within our company to share information.

I'd like to see cross-landscape correlation. Right now, things are in individual nodes, and we'd like to be able to have them integrate or work together better.

After the complex setup, we've had no issues with deployment.

This solution is extremely stable, and it has proven this across years of use.

Customer service has been outstanding. They are always there when we need them and we appreciate them.

Technical service has been outstanding. They are always there when we need them and we appreciate them.

There were three companies we looked at. Spectrum was chosen for its flexibility, for its ability to manage all device types, and ease of growth for our environment. Nothing scales like Spectrum.

It’s complex, we had consulting on site for several years.

We also looked at IBM.

We are very pleased with it. Plan, learn your environment, and plan the implementation. This is essential for success. Also, get CA support to help you document your environment before you start.

It's easy to implement. I've used it for 15 years so I may be biased, but that's also a testament to how easy it is to use.

It's also very configurable. You can add features as you'd like. For example, you can easily add new alerts and watch lists. We can easily certify new devices and watch the behavior of these new devices out of the box.

You can add scripting and export results to an external database. It makes it easy to use and sort the information in a way that can be helpful to you. I could go on for a week about it.

Currently I'm happy they went to 64 bit, which has just finished. I haven't thought about other improvements; maybe better reporting. Currently, it's using BOXI/CABI, which is terrible as it’s unclear and I don’t like this.

I've used it for 15 years. We use Spectrum on the network infrastructure for five to six clients. We also sell it as an integrator to other clients as well.

It’s very, very stable which is the core benefit, and it’s also very easy to maintain. It doesn’t need much maintenance once it's set up. The strongest point of the product is it's stability.

Last year they didn't do a lot of development, and when they did it, it wasn’t secure enough. Each version took a long time to be stable, but it's gotten much better. Now it's totally stable, but 9 wasn't stable. 9.4.0 wasn’t stable, but 9.4.1 is. Overall, version 9 has been great.

It's quite scalable. You can easily set up a distributed environment with more than one central server. We currently have it scaled up to 5000 devices on one central server (high for Belgium), and once they release v10.1 it'll be even higher, I've heard.

We're very happy with the technical support. Once, I wasn't that happy, but now I've taken technical sessions with them and they've been helpful. Many technical engineers who are assigned to me actually know me to some degree, but this is for their product. Performance management wasn’t as good, and their service for this is superior.

Before we were using the HP solution, but then CA bought them. We like this vendor becuase of the strong network management system. So, what’s important to me is particularly the product more than the vendor. Vendors that integrate would be a nice plus. That’s the main reason we initially actually stayed with CA because the products can talk to each other, which has a good flow.

This is my job – to start form nothing and then help others set up. I also help others use it as well, so I scale it up for myself and others, and CA has been helpful.

Get an overall perspective. CA is helpful and you should be willing to talk to them.