DX Spectrum Reviews

I have used Spectrum with four or five customers that are reasonably big. Some of them have an infrastructure that covers more than 30,000 desktops. 

If you are looking for the right monitoring tool, Spectrum is one of the best solutions. It covers networks very well. It has all the capabilities that you're looking for when it comes to monitoring. Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing. If you have a CA Service Desk, then it can be integrated so that if you have open tickets they can be closed automatically. The configuration manager is great as well. 

It's not a great performance management tool. Its reporting capabilities are not very good at all. 

I've used DX Spectrum for over 17 years.

It's a very stable product.

The scalability is there and architecture-wise it's simple. The interconnectivity is amazing.

CA Broadcom support is very bad—one of the worst. They are trying to improve a little, but right now, they don't even respond to a ticket for at least a couple of days. A customer is spending $100,000-200,000 on a product, and it takes them three days just to respond asking for the version number. And after the acquisition of Broadcom, it's only gotten worse. 

Setup is easy and pretty straightforward. If you have a simple architecture and everything is already together, it will only take a couple of hours. If you have an architecture that's more complex, then it takes only one day or two altogether.

In-house. The job generally requires at least two consultants for the implementation side. If it's a big customer you require at least two consultants to implement. For smaller and medium-sized customers, then one consultant is more than enough to implement this.

They are mostly on a perpetual license, but some of them are now moving to a subscription. 

If you are looking for better performance management, then you should supplement DX spectrum with another tool like CA Unified Infrastructure Management.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use DX Spectrum for monitoring secured networks.

The most valuable feature is the event correlation mechanism.

I also like the product's multi-customer approach.

They need a seamless integration to launch cloud-based management products of Broadcom.

In the future, more cloud-based solutions will be offered. It is necessary to strengthen the integration with other cloud-based products.

They also have other products that are Operational Intelligence, which is currently stand-alone and usually requires tighter integration. It should be simplified as well, as it is rather complex to create, and doesn't match the ideal situation. 

If the integration is simplified or improved, it will be a unique selling point in comparison to the competition on the market.

I have been working with DX Spectrum for 15 years.

Spectrum is quite stable.

DX Spectrum is very scalable.

Technical support is okay. A few years ago it was better, and I would have given them a ten out of ten, but now I would give them an eight out of ten.

We have extensive knowledge when it comes to using Spectrum. Some teams around me are using Zabbix.

The initial setup is quite complex. It takes a lot of knowledge, but it is well worth the effort.

We have our own consultants who are very knowledgeable key users.

The price is high enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive.

The price should be lower, it's not cheap, but we are willing to pay for it. For example, If you are asking for a Rolls Royce, you have to pay for a Rolls Royce.

I have been evaluating the differences between Spectrum and Zabbix, as well as the pricing.

For us, within that technology area, it is the standard for solutions that we can select. We haven't seen a better product.

Overall, I am happy with this solution.

Based on the current market, I would rate DX Spectrum a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for monitoring the network device. We have to configure the alert management and integrate it with Zabbix.

It's a good tool. It's simple to do the configuration. It has good discovery and integration.

It would be helpful to have a business layer and the possibility to integrate with information like the location and business structure. It's difficult to analyze and configure. It's not a very smart tool. It's a little old, and there are other tools that are more efficient.

From my point of view, the problem isn't the single tool itself because Spectrum and Zabbix are vertical tools for specific devices. So, Spectrum is vertical on a network. The problem is to have a correlation with the infrastructure layer, network layer, and business layer. In my experience, the client wants to see the business service.

The business service works fine, but when there is a problem on the business layer – for example, the web service or CRM process flow – it's difficult to correlate the business issues with infrastructure issues.

Now there are many APM monitoring tools. We have the artificial intelligence to correlate different alerts, aggregate alerts and give them to the client as a head-to-end picture. The problem with Spectrum is they still require effort to create the report to extract the configuration. This is a big limitation.

I would suggest improving the web GUI to improve the device monitor configuration and to improve or to integrate the new tool for reporting. For example, it can be helpful to integrate with a tool like Grafana or another dashboard to have a layer for the reporting.

I have used this solution for one year.

It's stable.

It's scalable, but in the future, the client will want to replace this tool with a different solution.

We have an internal process. When the network team asks to deliver a new network device, they have accounts and administrator privileges to take charge of all the specs for the new network device. We have to manage and check the tool. We have to configure the new alert and the new integration with Zabbix. The discovery is generally managed directly from the network team.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

Spectrum is a network report and configuration monitoring tool.

This is a very powerful tool with a lot of functionality. Once you have completed the training and have some experience using it, it's a very useful and powerful tool. 

We're trying to replace this solution with another product because it's too expensive and not very user-friendly; it requires training and takes some time to learn how to use it. 

I've been using this solution for 13 years. 

The solution is stable. 

We're a large enterprise user so the solution is scalable.

The technical support is very good. 

You must have the training that Broadcom provides as it allows you to make better use of the functionality of this tool. The solution is geared towards larger corporations and global companies and I rate it nine out of 10. 

Our main use case for this tool is monitoring. We also use it for configuration management and reporting.

One of the requests I've received from customers several times, which should be included in the next release of this tool, is the ability to export some of the topologies of DX Spectrum inside Microsoft Visio.

I've been working with DX Spectrum for 15 years, and I've worked with it within the last 12 months.

DX Spectrum is a very good product. It's stable. We have not faced a lot of issues with it, so most of the time, customers are very happy with this tool. They're happy with its stability.

DX Spectrum is the most scalable in the market. We're able to manage a lot of devices. We've not seen any real limit as to the scalability of this solution.

Technical support for this product is not so good. It's also not as good as it used to be. My rating for technical support is five out of ten.

The initial setup for this solution was simple.

I have already been working with DX Spectrum a lot. It's one of the tools I'm using the most, e.g. for my customers, as I'm both an implementer and reseller. It's not only me who's working with it, as some of my team members also deal with this solution.

This tool is now called DX NetOps Spectrum, and the latest release I've used is 21.2. We deploy it for our customers on-premises. We've never implemented it in SaaS.

DX Spectrum is a very good solution. It's the best network monitoring tool in the market.

How long the deployment for this solution takes will depend on the size of the customer, on the size of the environment. The minimum for a small customer would be five to ten days. For huge customers, deployment can take up to six months. Sometimes, when you are depending on use cases, we have to implement.

My advice to people who are planning to implement DX Spectrum is for them to spend some time in designing what they want from the solution, because it's very scalable. You have a lot of options inside the solution, so your take time building strong specifications, then ensure that everything's being implemented smoothly.

My rating for DX Spectrum is eight out of ten. The reason why I'm not putting a higher mark is because you can no longer sell it as a standalone product.

I'm also a reseller, and it's impossible now to sell this solution in its form. You need to sell it as part of the NetOps, or suite of net tools inside the Broadcom portfolio, which is something feasible for big customers, but not for customers in small to medium-sized businesses. They would be interested in DX Spectrum, but not in the full suite of the network monitoring tool.

It was software-based deployment, and we were monitoring the internal network and client devices of an enterprise MSP. We were also using it for generating alerts for ticketing.

We were able to monitor their entire network infrastructure and receive valuable alerting in a timely fashion so that we could react to any instances when there were down devices.

The containerization of different objects was very helpful in building an org structure. Being able to separately manage your MSP clients with separate visibility was also helpful.

Scalability is a highly rated feature of this solution. It is better than some of the other tools that I've used in terms of scalability. We scaled it to tens of thousands of devices.

The granular access control that it provided so that you could only see devices that were related to what you were working on was great. I couldn't see the entire inventory of devices. I could only see the ones that were related to my work. It has got a very granular access control component.

For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts.

Its visualization can be improved. It doesn't have a very advanced GUI. It is very basic and simple, but it does work.

I used this solution for two and a half years. I have used it within the last 12 months.

It was quite stable. We had very few outages during the time I used it.

From the scalability perspective, it was fantastic. We were able to monitor our entire infrastructure at the telco level. We were also able to monitor all of the network tools and devices within our client containers. It was a very scalable product. Overall, 3,000 to 4,000 users were using it, and we probably had tens of thousands of devices.

I did not use their technical support. We didn't get an opportunity to do that.

I was not involved in its deployment. It was done well prior to my being part of the team that was using it. 

In terms of maintenance, it requires just the standard software updates and patching. It doesn't require anything out of the ordinary. You just have to deal with more of the ordinary patching cycles. I didn't actually have any experience updating the entire system itself. That was outside of my scope of work. Because we were deploying it at a telco level, we had several teams working on it. My role was adding and removing devices and updating devices for the customers I was supporting. We would add and remove devices in the client networks and the client containers based on the additions and removal of the hardware in the system.

We've been using this solution for probably the last eight to ten years through ongoing upgrades and updates. If there wasn't a return on investment by using the platform, our organization would have gone for a different solution. We're very cost-conscious, so we were able to get the value that we were looking for out of it.

I would advise others to be prepared to do some fine-tuning and scripting to support the product. With any tool of this nature, there are going to be some customizations to monitor certain devices. You should also make sure that you get your containers organized correctly. If you organize the containers correctly with different groups assigned, it will make your life a lot easier to be able to organize your data. Have a solid structure for that and a good plan.

I would rate DX Spectrum an eight out of ten. It was a really solid platform. They did a really great job. The coordination of alerting was probably the biggest issue we had, just because of the scale of the network we were dealing with.

Our use cases for the solution are configuration backup, performance monitoring and presentations for the upper management. I'm an assistant admin and we are customers of DX Spectrum. 

The presentation layer is pretty simple and straightforward and the dashboard is pretty easy to read.

The visual is good but it's a little archaic. I think it's the way it's compiled, because I've been struggling recently with deploying it in different departments. The software still uses a 32 bit library on the Linux boxes for installation. Every admin scratches their head when I ask them to install, 16 or 17 packages, 32 bit packages on a 64 bit architecture.

Also, they dumped all the documentation from the old versions and re-tagged them with the new version and they haven't updated them for a few years. That's a bit of a problem. They need to get rid of Java and 32 bit applications proctors, and that would be good.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The stability isn't bad. There are Java issues but that could be because of our setup so I wouldn't blame the software. Although again, using Java is a little outdated. 

The solution can be scaled to an unlimited amount. We have 50 users, usually admins and managers.

I don't have much to compare it to but something that stands out is probably the ease of dealing with tech support. It's one of the better relationships that I've had with tech support. They always respond and they're on time.

The setup isn't complex it's just not up to date. It's 2021, why would anybody use a 32 bit package for an application. 

You need to make sure the product runs in your environment because it might not be compatible with some people's setup. 

For now, I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Spectrum is mainly for fault management. For performance management, we have a NetOps performance manager.

The fault management is perfect. You have alerts just in time.

The interface is user friendly.

I think the management or configuration of devices needs some improvement. 

The ability to add new device families from different vendors also not easy. It's a bit difficult.

I would like to see some historical performance of our devices added to Spectrum. That would be great.

It's a live solution, not for historical performance.

Reporting is also an area that could be better. The reporting tool they are using is called Jasper and it requires an official license to be able to work well. It would be helpful to have reporting included directly with Spectrum.

I have been using this solution for 12 years. I started with it when it was NetQS.

We are using the latest version of DX Spectrum.

It's very stable.

It's easy to scale. 

You can have multiple Spectrum servers and you can add them at any time.

We have contacted technical support with both the online support to CA and with Broadcom.

We have not faced a lot of issues with DX Spectrum. 

When we had one, we received very good technical support.

I was a vendor for CA before they were acquired by Broadcom.

The initial setup is very easy. 

After 10 minutes, you have a complete Spectrum up and running and you can start discovery immediately.

The deployment is very fast and straightforward.

I was doing a comparison between Spectrum and different vendors like Celeron, HP, IBM, and for me and a big entity, like a national bank of Egypt, and it was the best. It ranks as number one.

We have the DX Spectrum and DX NetOp for performance center management from Broadcom also. Actually, we have the full fledge from Broadcom and had it from Computer Associates before Broadcom started.

The distributed installation is on-premise, and we have one interface server and approximately six Spectrum servers.

I definitely recommend this product.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.