DX Spectrum Reviews

The primary use case of DX Spectrum is for monitoring and network fault management. If you have a carrier or a large-scale network and you would like to monitor it, DX Spectrum is one of the best solutions on the market. 

This is an on-prem solution. 

Some of the most valuable features are it's highly scalable, the carrier is great, and if something has SNMP, it can monitor it. It's a great network fault management solution. 

DX Spectrum could be improved by them getting rid of the Java console. It would also be better with Turkish language support. 

As for additional features, they release changes quarterly. Right now, the only thing I would like is Turkish support. 

We have been providing this solution to customers for over 10 years. 

This solution is stable. 

DX Spectrum is highly scalable, which is why they are used by the biggest ISPs and carriers in Turkey. 

Their tech support is very good. 

The initial setup depends on the implementation, but it normally takes a couple of days to a week. It depends on the size of the project. 

We implement this solution for customers. We are currently providing professional services to four customers. In Turkey, there are probably more than ten customers that use DX Spectrum. 

There is actually no base Spectrum product—it becomes DX NetOps. It's part of the product family, and Broadcom changed its name. New customers cannot buy DX Spectrum, they can buy DX NetOps, and Spectrum is a part of that family. 

I rate DX Spectrum a nine out of ten. 

The primary use case of this solution is for Network Monitoring.

The most valuable feature is the availability to put health checks in place not only for the infrastructure but for some of the services that are on top of the infrastructure. This allows us to identify the performance of the infrastructure.

Integration with some other tools, and integration with some Network Packet Broker, need some improvement.

We have been using DX Spectrum for approximately nine months.

This solution is stable. We have not experienced any outages.

It's a cloud solution, so it's scalable.

We have not contacted technical support yet.

We are also using Microsoft Network Node Manager.

The main difference is the availability to do the health-check on not only the devices but also some application services. These are in addition to the infrastructure, and with Network Node Manager, it's more based on infrastructure.

Also, the Drill down feature that DX Spectrum provides is something the Network Node Manager typically cannot do, as well as to drill down on a specific case or on a specific device.

That's also a really good feature of DX Spectrum.

The initial setup was quite straightforward.

The price is very high.

It makes it very difficult with respect to the business because, with any other product, we have to look at a lower-cost licensing model. It would have to be much lower than this one.

It would make sense to have some kind of corporate license with some additional flexibility.

We evaluated SolarWinds and Azure.

We are still looking at other solutions to increase the capacity of the devices that are being monitored with DX Spectrum.

We have a small set of devices being monitored and we are running a project to try to duplicate the monitoring on those devices.

DX Spectrum has been great for us. It's the strongest available, the main problem is the pricing, but it's in accordance with the features.

I can recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it. 

I would rate DX Spectrum an eight out of ten.

We actually service providers for CA Spectrum. If we create a solution for a customer with this type of API, we use CA Spectrum to monitor this API.

I have found the cross-analysis feature to be the most valuable. The many alerts you get have an impact on the connectivity, so you need a very good correlation for layer 1, layer 2, layer 3, and layer 4, layered at the understanding of the technology, which locates the spectrum. It's really unique in this type of solution.

We have been using CA Spectrum for over 15 years, I think.

The stability is very good - the best we've seen in the market.

It is very scalable. We scale to up to 50,000 devices or so. That's the sizing we usually pulse. And we haven't had any issues so far.

We thought that because we are not beginners anymore, we have very high expertise ourselves, so we usually take a second-class support approach or we fix it ourselves. But when it's more complex, it takes a little bit more time.

For us, the implementation was quite complex but it's because of the large number of different environments we're dealing with. So it's not the tool, it's the domain expertise. We need optimized implementation.

Time for deployment really depends on the size of the domain. It can be done in half a day, or it can take you up to eight months or even longer. So it depends on the domain complexity. And then it's not building an application itself; you have to design first, and that is the biggest chunk. It costs you eight percent. So if the design is done properly, then the building is already configurated. There are still a lot of app ports that can be done to help us out.

We going more for a solidified network so we need some improvement there, based on the current level of support for our network. And a more detailed integration with NetFlow data is important for us as well. I also feel that the CIS lock-based correlation needs to be developed as well. So on a scale from one to 10, I will rate CA Spectrum an eight.

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 primary use case is to monitor networks.

It is easy to understand and determine when and/or where the network is failing. 

All the features are working fine.

Make it easier to certify devices. 

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 our network devices and our weighing devices out to our clients. It is an awesome product. It works really well.

It covers a lot of different types of hardware. It can do a lot and saves us time.

The breath of the product.

A better integration with the UIM, as far as being able to do root cause analysis and that type of analytics. 

They are separate products. There is some integration recently of the two, but not really at what I will say at the analytics level to tie the two, from one problem to the other. 

It is very stable. We have not had any major issues in over 10 years.

It scales really well.

I have not used technical support, but other people on my team have. I have not heard anything negative about the support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I would consider this at the top for doing this type of monitoring.

Sometimes it can be overly complex, but at the same time, it does give you a lot of capabilities. It is complex in just the varieties and the capabilities it has.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Combination of meeting the requirements and the cost.

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.