DX Spectrum Reviews

• Global deployment for AIG NOC
• Deployment in customer networks, as well as multi-tenant deployment at Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) 
  

The Spectrum tool improved our network assurance levels for our business units. However, the CA Technologies sales team destroyed their relationship with our business units.

• Monitoring
• The dashboard 

It needs better integration with other CA products.

We migrated all monitoring, which was previously monitored by the Applications Manager for CA Spectrum/CA eHealth.

All networks (or network equipment) are monitored through CA Spectrum. However, the service monitoring part of the tool is not the best solution.

For networks:

• CA Spectrum
• CA eHealth

For applications:

• CA UIM
• Zabbix has always supported us in custom monitoring, scripting, etc.
  

OS monitoring needs to be better developed, as well as their services, e.g., cluster monitoring, URLs, etc.

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. 

Monitoring. We set it up so that other people can watch everything and let us know if something goes down, or processing needs to be restarted. Then, sometimes, it just does that on its own. Air conditioner overheating. Stuff like that.

For the most part it has been good. There were snags in the beginning, learning curves, and the like, but it's relatively easy.

The monitoring just comes to us: "Oh, there's something wrong with that machine." It tells us. There are some 50,000 machines or so, all doing different things. And if they go down we hear about it.

It's improved things because we know when something's down and we know when something needs to be taken care of and when not.

The fact that I don't have to sit and watch things. They get monitored, and then I hear about them and take care of them as needed.

If they could interact with the MIBs of vendors better, and have a lot more pre-loaded ones, that would be amazing for us right now.

It's up most of the time. It's good. At first there were a couple snags here and there, but lately, it's been great.

One issue, after two weeks, we had to pass it up, escalate it, suddenly, and the next person went and solved it. Most of the time it's been solved or we've talked to engineers. Most of the time it's been good. No one's perfect.

There were problems with it going down, or generating extra tickets. But mostly, that got worked out after a little while, with tech support and us going back and forth getting solutions to the problems. It's been great recently.

What has surprised me most about CA has been the inner knowledge of some of their techs. I had no idea what was going on and they were like, "Hey, we got it."

It's great. You can just keep adding stuff.

I would say it's a lot like other tech support. Some of it is great, and some of it is unreasonable. The ones that know their stuff, know their stuff. And the ones that are learning, are learning.

A couple other solutions. It cancelled some of those out. 

We switched because it was a bigger thing. We swapped so we could have support for just one monolithic thing, as opposed to a lot of little things. 

It just had more support, we could call somebody. It was very complex business software. We probably still don't use 40% of the solution at this point.

I would say mixed bag.

We wanted to make it so it was automated with a text file, so we didn't have to watch the little bar the whole time and answer those questions. We wanted all the configuration in one little file. So we had to figure out where that was and how they do that. Once that got done, then automation of getting it deployed to new environments, if we need to, is very fast. We just change a line or two in the text file and say, "Do this," and walk away. It's great.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• knowledgeable tech support
• reasonable forums
• documentation.

I give it an eight out of 10 because it's not perfect, but it's better than a lot of what's out there. There is still a lot of work you need to do on it. Even though it's a vendor product there is still a lot of support you have to have to get certain things. 

Again, we have a very diverse environment; Cisco stuff, air conditioners. To get all that to work to it's full potential with this product, monitoring-wise, is work. So if there was more interconnectivity already in it that would help. For instance, we had devices that were added six months ago that weren't operating to their full potential. Then we would realize, "Oh, this one needs to be done." So we have to run these end processes. Again, the are a lot of devices. Not all of them are doing this, but enough that we have to sift through them, manually, and get this one working and that one working. So that's why it's not a 10.

In terms of advice, I would tell people to load all the MIBs before you add the devices. Literally.

It helps our NetOps group actually handle alarms in a way that lets them see the bigger picture of those alarms, and how they might affect our services. It helps us communicate information about the network state better to services that might be impacted by a specific network condition.

Spectrum allows us to have a holistic view of our network architecture. We have a pretty heterogeneous topology at U of M, we're a half Cisco, half Juniper shop, and we have multiple layers to our network topology. So, it's really important for us to be able to do that topological map, and be able to visualize the network state at any given time.

Spectrum is interesting because it's a super-mature product for CA, and it works really, really well the way it is. In terms of new features and functionality, I feel like there has to be a transition there. The Spectrum OneClick is a Java-based client, and that's aging. Really, before any new feature integration, I'd love to see a comprehensive rebuild of the UI.

It's pretty stable for us. We have, not a highly available implementation of Spectrum, but we have an active standby situation, where we have an active SpectroSERVER and a standby SpectroSERVER and an active OneClick and a standby OneClick running all the time. So it works out pretty well that way.

As the kind of enterprise that straddles the line between telco size and enterprise size, it scales for us, because we're not all the way at telco yet. Maybe one day.

Pretty good. They're super responsive. They have that four-tier system and that works pretty well, because if we have a question, we can ask it at a lower priority and it will still get answered. If we have something where our hair is on fire, they'll call us right away.

It could be a little bit better, to be honest. The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated, I think.

When selecting a vendor, the most important consideration is product; it has to be product and features.

I'd give it an eight out of 10 right now, because it does what we need it to do. It could go an extra 20 percent somewhere.

Fault Domain isolation is the primary use case for our teams with this tool.  Once configured, it centralizes alerting on conditions that would require an experienced NW engineer to investigate at the command prompt.

This tool provides excellent Fault Domain isolation when properly instrumented and configured, allowing quick action on links/routers/switches/etc.

Easy navigation from initial alerts to a full topology and detail on the Network infrastructure and it relationships is the most valuable feature

The configurations are still XML-based and require a good deal of coding to setup each object for monitoring.  Alerting is yet more coding, and relationships are more coding... In a drag-and-drop world, this tool is in need of a bit more than a make-over. 

In house

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.

We use Spectrum to monitor our infrastructure, servers, network, routers, switches, to make sure that all of our services and infrastructure components are all up and operational all the time. And if they're not, we're responsible for alerting the people who are responsible for the different components and parts. It's a pretty important part of our operational M.O. as we move forward, making sure stuff is up and running.

The performance has been fantastic.

Since I put this solution in, over the last five years, we have actually reduced the number of alerts that go out and wake people up in the middle of the night by 70%.

The stability of the product is key. It never breaks, really. The stability and reliability of the Spectrum product have been top-notch.

The only reason you're not going to know that your stuff is up and running is because you set it up wrong, not because it's not doing its job.

Better integration with all the other products in the Agile suite of tools; anything they could do to make that less complex, would be great. They've made it less complex, it's getting better as time goes. It's just such a long road because different products were originally different companies that have been hooked together, acquired, and then assembled as their overall solution. And there's good and bad in that.

The good is they have all these capabilities in a one-stop shop. That's awesome. But, sometimes those were competing products that are now having to work together, and they have to come in and force them together. It adds to the complexity.

If nobody else has said documentation, let's go there. I understand, you can either write about it or you can do it. And most of us would rather they do it, but now that they've done it, those of us that didn't do it, we need to go and find: "Where did they write about this to tell us how to do it?" That's always lacking.

Some of the products are better than others at documentation. Some are them are very good and some of them are not as good. It's a little disheartening when you go in to find whatever it is procedure you need to do and it's just not there. Or it's wrong. That's my favorite.

It scales way beyond what we need. I can actually do everything I need to do on one server, even though I have multiple for redundancy. I'm not going to say that I've not had problems with failover and all, because I haven't had to do that; other than me forcing it to do it and switch around. It hasn't actually broken on its own so it hasn't needed to activate its redundancy.

The support folks, that's another aspect of it; partnering with CA to make sure that our stuff is up and running. And if there is a problem with it, they have some really decent people that will get on and help you come up with solutions.

Tech support is great. I usually fill out the surveys when they help me. I haven't had many really bad experiences with support. The people I've worked with, if it's a critical issue, they are right on it. If it's more of a generic thing like, "How do I do that?" they get back to you within a reasonable amount of time with the answer.

I did the architecture and implementation, soup to nuts; made the Kool-aid, served the Kool-aid, drank the Kool-aid, every day.

The nature of what we do in this space is complex anyway. There's only so much you can simplify at this level of complexity. And as much as it is complex, they've made it a simple as they can.

I think the short list for Spectrum was Solar Winds, Nagios, Spectrum, of course, and BMC.

You look around and see there are a lot of home-grown things, and multiple different solutions from different vendors that just don't work together, or they can't work together for whatever reason.

One thing I like about the one-stop shop with CA is we don't have to have staff to be experts in 84 different things. If I need these two things to work together, if nothing else, I can call support and say, "I tried this and it's not working. Why is this not working?" And they'll get on the phone and WebEx and look and eventually you will get it working.

When it comes to my most important criteria for selecting a vendor, ease of use is always one of the top ones: How many people in wagons and trucks, and servers, how many things do I have to have to run this tool, this product? That is the key factor in my evaluation.

Of course, price, obviously, that goes without saying. The cost of some of these products are a little cost prohibitive, which is unfortunate. We have to find lower cost solutions for some of the things that we have to pull in. 

For the most part, CA has capabilities in pretty much everything that you would need. You just have to figure out where are you going to spend the most money for what you have to actually get done. You can do all these things but, which ones do you have to do? And that's hard to choose sometimes because you want to do them all.