DX Spectrum Reviews

• Root cause analysis
• Configurations management
• Device compatibility features (buit-in, MIBs and device self-certification)

Not from my organization, but for our customers. They managed to monitor their infrastructure at a deeper level, more detailed and technical specific view (NOC-like and NOC-compliant features), and of course at different levels (IT management, IT operational etc.). Also, by integrating with other products like CA Unified Infrastructure Management or CA Service Desk Manager, you can achieve a greater value.

The graphical interface is still designed in an old fashioned way, and they should include some management views in a much more modern manner.

I have been implementing it for three years.

Spectrum is a very stable product. It is a mature product, with a long life time in CA’s portfolio, and even before.

Spectrum is a very scalable product. You can add more than one SpectroServers for balancing and availability.

It's very good, 10/10.

Very good, also for device self-certification, development. There is also a very strong community (actually multiple communities) – 10/10

I have used and implemented the old product, CA Infrastructure Management, which included Spectrum, but also I am implementing CA UIM.

The initial setup is straightforward, and after the initial setup you can start the device discovery. You can configure multiple discovery profiles and schedule them as you please. After discovery, you can see devices and servers in the universe and you can start to manage them.

The configuration is easy, but it depends on the device’s technology. The discovery is very easy to do and the topology view is customizable.

Although Spectrum is an easy to install and have it ready to use product, it is a very complex solution and it can be customized in so many ways. So, for large environments or NOCs I would definitely recommend specialized implement team like from CA’s partners or CA Services.

The other option from CA is CA Unified Infrastructure Management, but it lacks for configuration management feature. It is positioned differently on the market.

I do not know any other product better for NOCs. When you start researching for this kind of solution, you should have prepared a list with all your devices you want to manage, and features you want from this solution. Usually the number and type of the devices is important.

Don't consider this product a service desk product. It is an infrastructure management product with some light features for incident management. Spectrum is great for what it does as a management tool. You can monitor your infrastructure, manage events and alarms as you please (aggregation, alarm suppressing, thresholds, rules, etc.), manage configurations for network devices (depends on the management capabilities of the device), monitor SLAs and other great stuff like these.

There are a number of features that make this product to standout from other competing products:

• Easy implementation with scalable architecture
• Seamless HA capabilities with no issues
• Integrations with other products including both north/south bound capabilities
• NCM - Network Configuration Manager for Device level configurations
• Expert CA support for the product.

In our environment, I have implemented CA Spectrum in HA. There is also Spectrum SOI integration for alert forwarding. We have created global collections to group the infrastructure with policies applied as per requirement. Also the SANM (Spectrum Alarm Notification Manager) has proven to be very useful for managing critical devices and immediate action to be taken with email notification etc.

The only area which I found that can be improved is that sometimes issues come up with alert clearing i.e. alerts don't clear when triggered and clear events occur too fast. CA should come up with ways where the alert is not valid, Spectrum should be able to re-verify and take action accordingly.

I have been using CA Spectrum for more than four years now. These four years include:

• Implementation of the solution in production environments
• Setting up of failover (High Availability)
• Integrations with other CA products like CA BOXI (for reporting), CA Service Desk (for ticketing), and CA SOI integration through connectors

No issues with deployment.

Never faced any issues with scalability. As the network infrastructure grows, to add new Spectrum servers is very straight forward with almost zero defects in existing architecture.

With expert CA Support, issues with the product can have a quick resolution so 4.5/5.

CA Spectrum is one of the products from CA which has great technical expertise to support it.

I have been working on Spectrum from day one but I have experience with other similar products. I found Spectrum as being a complete network management solution with a great user friendly GUI.

The best feature of this product is the simplicity of its architecture, which, once understood, makes the implementation very easy. I have never ever faced any issues with the initial setup.

I have implemented the complete initial setup myself. I have also done implementation with failover (High Availability) and integrations with other EMS products.

There are other similar products from IT majors IBM, and HP but we found Spectrum to be the most suitable for all of the major requirements of my organisation.

I would definitely recommend going ahead with the product. It will able to answer most of the network management related requirements of any organisation.

Availability and outages reporting is valuable.

It gives an depth report of availability and outages, and by using it you can further analyze and find exactly where the bottlenecks lie.

A lot. Decommissioned servers availability and outages keep showing and that is annoying because it's ultimately contributing to the final availability (actual) which it should not.

I've used it for two and a half years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I've never had to use it.

I've never had to use it.

I didn't use a previous solution.

It's a bit complex.

55%-75%.

No other options were evaluated.

It's not the best product for availability and outages reporting.

• Alerting via SNMP traps
• Inventory
• WAN modeling
• Serial numbers, etc.

Before this product we used a simple product that just used ping to verify devices were up.

• MIB database needs to be more up to date
• The software needs to be more tunable
• CA has a one size fits all model
• The application is not well written. You could throw 10 CPU’s and 20 Gig of memory at a database server and it will only use so much. This is running on Windows 2003 Server 64-bit and the CA Spectrum application is supposedly a true 64 bit application

I've used it for 10 years.

Yes, in a large environment working with CA engineers we ended up doing it three times. They had a different vision of how it should be done.

In the beginning very much so, we are now at a point where it’s pretty stable.

It scales, but each time you up scale it, more or less, you need to rebuild it.

It's poor.

It's poor.

The previous product did not scale and it was very basic. If you need enterprise network and server monitoring & alerting there are very few options out there.

It's complex for an enterprise. For example, we have three database servers and one web server for our environment.

CA support sent a field engineer out for the initial installation, and then a different one to fix it because it kept crashing,

This product requires, in larger environments, one full time employee dedicated to it.

• NCM backup
• Ease of going through the event history

The product was underdeveloped at our organisation for various reasons, so I am unable to comment.

Mainly testing on CA's side!

I've used it for 18 months.

Yes, multiple issues were encountered. Most were related to the lack of testing and inadequate documentation.

Yes, IM was very shaky and it seemed like CA were throwing hotfixes at us to fend us off until the next release.

No issues were encountered.

5/10.

8/10 but 10/10 when they were pushed.

Yes, we used Nagios, and SCOM. It not my decision to switch and I don't know why.

You either know how to deploy such a system or you don't. the manuals were 5/10.

We used an in-house team.

We also evaluated HP Openview.

Spectrum is designed for large infrastructures, anything less than 4000 devices and it is probably a waste of money

• The ease of discovery of managed devices into the tool set
• The ease of placement of managed devices into the tool set
• The integration with CA Service Desk
• Email integration

Since Spectrum is integrated with our Service Desk, implementation alerts generate a USD request which then fire off notifications to the responsible engineers.

The ability to import new MIBs and manage new devices.

I've used it for nine years.

No issues encountered.

Only if the server that hosts the application is restarted without bringing down Spectrum. If this occurs it corrupts the database and has to be restored from the backup.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

Yes, we used TNG, which was impossible to manage.

It was straightforward. It has the ability to discover your environment and devices easily.

We used a combination of an in-house team and a vendor team. The expertise of the vendor team was good.

For network management, this application is by far the best.

The one-click console.

We use this as part of our infrastructure monitoring and it's done through a console. With the timely alerts that our MTTR reduced, we could determine the impact of the outage as well as the root cause of the issue.

It took a while to understand the product, but once we went hands on, it's great to work with. I have previously used Tivoli Enterprise console which doesn’t need any expertise and is easy to learn.

I've used it for two years.

I have never seen an outage of the tool.

My organization is rapidly growing with servers being added to the data center and we have never faced any issues.

I have never used customer service.

Using the tool comes as part of my job because my company uses CA Spectrum for their infrastructure monitoring. Previously, I have used Tivoli Console.

Setup was very straightforward.

It was done in-house.

I have used the product to monitor our company’s infrastructure.

I would strongly recommend it.

The ability to monitor your WAN and LAN infrastructure in a simple GUI.

We keep this product up and monitoring 24x7 for fast and simple availability.

Really unsure of any, quite pleased with product.

Going on two years.

There are a very few occasions when the system "barfs" and it looks like your infrastructure has gone dark, but it bounces back quickly (the system).

None so far. We are one of the largest networks in America and it hasn't so far.

8/10.

9/10.

I believe it was done in-house.

Not sure of the exact number, but our clients charge $50,000 a minute so every second counts.

This is a good product, just be sure to train the ones who are setting it up because this is based on manual data entry and/or SNMP.