DX Spectrum Reviews

We use it to monitor the fault of our network to make sure that the infrastructure that delivers our services to our end users is up and all the redundancy is up. 

It performs really well in these tasks. It is one of its core competencies.

Spectrum is heavily loaded with alarm configuration, so it can detect whenever things go wrong. Things that I didn't even know could go wrong on my network. It picks up on those. I have integrated it into my ITIL management, incident management, change management, and problem management systems, so it feeds right in to my existing processes.

Spectrum is really good at discovering what I have out there just by giving it the list of things: my inventory. I feed in my inventory, and it discovers what is out there and how they are all connected to each other. 

I would like to see them eliminate the Java console. The user interface for this is a Java applet that runs on your desktop, and it is very problematic for us in a large organization where Java is looked at as the big, bad evil thing that we should never have installed on anybody's computer because of security reasons and all that. Also, Java has an old look and feel, and it is slow-performing, as far as the client application is concerned. That is the reason why a lot of applications have gone web-based. 

What I would like to see out of the next version of Spectrum is a web-based GUI that is completely incorporated into what we call the "Performance Center", which is an existing system that is kind of a manager of managers, a Mom, if you will. That manager of managers would be the perfect place. 

It is a CA product. It is a mature product, but it does have issues. It does have issues that any product will have, but the nice thing is that CA does a pretty good job of addressing those issues.

It is really scalable. When we were first installing it, it would have required nine servers on-premise, which was a pretty big ask for us. Then, right towards the end of our prep for deployment, they released a new version that simplified it down to one. This was incredibly useful for us because that meant that we could really scale it up and really bring a lot of the stuff together that was on separate systems before.

We have used support. The only real downside we have seen with the support is sometimes it will take a while for them to get back to us. Most of the time when we run into a problem, it is a complex problem that Level 1 just can't fix. Because if Level one could have fixed it, we probably could have fixed it ourselves. 

We sometimes run into a situation where they are having to escalate back to somebody else who is on vacation who has had somebody else come in for him. There is slowness there, but other than that, they have been able to eventually address our issues. 

We have had one support issue that has been open for a couple of months, and it is currently open. It is a pretty tricky issue. It is incredibly difficult to replicate, which is the main reason that it is taking so long for them to fix it, because they can't really just go in, do what we do, and have it show up. When they do what we do, it does not show up, until randomly it does show up. 

I have been in a support organization before, and I know how hard it can be to troubleshoot random issues.

We did not have a previous solution. I came onto the scene to help clean up and modernize a lot of our operations. This was one of the things we looked at.

As one of my operation managers put it, we were driving down the road at 80 miles an hour with the windscreen painted black. Sometimes, we would roll down the windows and stick our head out the window, but we recognized it as a big gap. It was something that we needed: good fault monitoring. 

The initial setup was complex. We have an operations team who was responsible for doing it. They spent a lot of time working with CA on a couple of different issues that were not as straightforward. Mainly because our environment is significantly different than the typical environment that CA would have expected. 

It is the same problem that you run into with anybody who sells software. They think users use software a certain way, but then users do not use it that way. Or, you think the user's environment is going to be a certain way, so you build things it that depend on it being that way, but when it gets into the real world, you find out, "Oh well, you don't have it that way? Why don't you have it that way? Oh, I never even considered that you would have a reason for not doing it that way." So, those are the kind of things that we run into, because we are a company that does not do things your typical way.

We looked at a lot of different options and Spectrum was the one that met all of our criteria. Scalable and expansive enough to capture everything that we needed to capture, and even things that we did not even know we needed to capture.

We were looking at some of the other giant, old-blood software companies. The main reason we chose Spectrum over any other solution was mainly because it was mature, but it was also going places. We could see the future of where Spectrum was trying to go. We could see where it was going to be and where we needed it to be in two years when we get there in two years. 

Wayne Gretzky said, "I skate to where the hockey puck is going to be." We saw that Spectrum was headed to where the hockey puck was going to be. That means that when we adopted it, it was not where the hockey puck was. We understood that when we were getting it that we would deal with those pains up front, then eventually, we would be ahead of the game.

Every once in a while, you will run into somebody who will surprise you by being innovative or by showing you that they have a vision for something, and that they are working or striving towards acting like a startup within this big monolithic steam train that is CA.

I would look at the capabilities that Spectrum has to integrate with other solutions and be part of a bigger solution. When you are doing something like this, you have to have a bigger vision of what you are going to have across the board, then understand that this plays part of that, and it fills an important role.

It is better than your average bear. It is a good tool. It is a very robust tool. It has a lot of capabilities. I can't give it a 10 just because there are times when I will be working with the tool, and I will run across something that I do not like, some kind of feature that doesn't work the way I expect it to work, and it is not intuitive, and I will talk to CA about it, and they will say something like, "Well, nobody has ever tried to think about it that way," or, "Nobody's ever asked us that question." I'm like, "This thing is 20 years old. How has nobody ever asked that question?" 

More than likely, what I tend to believe is that they were not listening when somebody asked that question, which is actually something that has changed recently. I think Mike Gregoire has done a good job of changing the attitude of a lot of the stuff, and they have got some new leadership that has really made it so that they are now listening. Whenever I bring up something like this, they say, "Yeah, we know. You've brought this up before. This other guy has brought that same thing up. We understand it." It does not help solve the problem. There are pieces of the software that are still not intuitive. However, the fact that they are listening makes a difference.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We do not actually select vendors. We select products. Really, I could care less whether or not the product comes from CA because we have other stuff with CA. In fact, we tend to frown on picking a product just because it comes from a vendor that we are already doing business with. It makes it so that we are not very agile. We have to really consider the solution very objectively. We only consider the vendor when it comes to their history of being able to perform, their history of being able to support and provide top-notch solutions. We frown on coupling the purchase of one tool, or the acquisition of a tool, just because we own another tool by that same vendor. So, we do not really select vendors.

Mostly SNMP trap management.

I am fairly new to the product end of the solution. We have not utilized it to its full capabilities yet. I think we are still trying to figure out how to get the most out of it. 

The network mapping functionality.

I would like to see better scalability, and maybe, a more intuitive user interface. 

It seems fairly stable. We have had some issues with the spec server and the high availability replication of data. It fails over well, but it does not come back very well. We get duplicated events. 

It seems okay, but not great. 

Good, if you get the right people. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I have looked a little into open source solutions.

The product is not terrible, but not great.

Our primary use case is to monitor all of our network infrastructure. Spectrum can monitor any type of infrastructure, but for us it's our network infrastructure. We also use it for configuration management. We have alarm/event management, network discovery, inventory, things of that nature.

One of the improvements is that we have a reliable inventory. Spectrum does such a great job of discovering our network that we have a high confidence in what our inventory is and because of that we're confident in the reporting we get. We can plan changes and replacement of end-of-life products in our environment very well because it's very accurate. It's very strong.

There are many valuable features but the ability to have all the inventory reports, event reports, configuration management. 

It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one. That's one of its strengths.

The only pain point I have is some issues with support and the timeliness of getting a resolution. Other than that, we're very pleased with the functionality. They're coming out with Spectrum 10.3 and I'm sure it'll have some additional functionality. For our environment there's not a pain point from a functionality perspective.

Stability is good. The tool is a complicated tool. It's got a lot of pieces to it, databases, and you have to treat it well. You can't just turn it off randomly. There are pieces to turning it off, methods. As long as you know that then it is stable. 

We rarely have any issues with it. You have to make sure you follow the process correctly to shut it down, bring it up.

I don't have a lot to compare it to but I wouldn't say it's overly delicate. 

We grow about 10% a year. We have about 5000, 6000 devices. Scalability is not an issue for us because Spectrum is 64-bit. The scalability is not a concern for our environment with this version of Spectrum.

Technical support is good. What I like about Spectrum is that they have a chat support. You can choose to open a regular case or you can try a chat support. It just depends on what your issue is. There are some things which are lower priority. 

We've had good success doing a chat support. It saves a lot of time. Usually you can get an answer pretty quickly. There are some cases where I've had a longer response because the issue is more complicated. 

Spectrum is a very wide product, the breadth of it, there's so many features and functionalities. I think it's a challenge for support, sometimes, because the person I may get assigned may not be as familiar with the feature I'm opening a case about. That would be maybe an area for improvements. I've worked with many different Spectrum support people. They may be real strong in one area but not so strong in another function of Spectrum. That's a challenge.

There are some cases where they may have to reach out to development to further diagnose your issue. That's where we do lose some time with support cases. Most of the cases are not severity-2 or severity-1 cases. Most of my cases are lower priority but it may be an issue that's a bug and it may take a little more effort to find out.

You have to adjust your expectations. If you come to Spectrum with a lower priority issue, depending on what happens, that may take a month, or it could be longer, to work through, recreate it. That could be a downside. I think you have to adjust your expectations to some of the support. I think there might be some room for improvement there because, when they have to reach out to development, that really slows things down.

Many enterprises have something called "tool sprawl." Over time you invest in tools and all of a sudden you step back and realize there is some overlap in the tool set that you have. You have tool X and tool Y and they each do some different things but then they do some of the same things as well. You realize you have some overlap.

We had a maintenance contract come to term. We paused and listed all of our tools and listed their functionality and made a matrix, then added to that what we wanted to look for in the future. Then we stepped back and we evaluated different vendors, and CA was one of those vendors. We looked at their offerings and from that process we decided to go with a CA suite of infrastructure management tools.

We used CA Professional Services. I was along with them. I would say it's a little on the complex side. 

The initial install, there's a little bit of complexity to it because you're dealing with operating systems. You have to make sure all the prerequisites are done, anti-virus exceptions, etc. You have to have a service account. Then there's the bringing it up and then there's discovery of the network and setting that up. It takes time. It's not like where you set it up, here you go, hand it over. No. 

You can hand over a bare-bones install but after that you have to import your network, make sure it's modeled correctly, make sure all the dependencies are mapped. Once it's installed that's just step one. Then setting it up to get to a steady state, that's step two. Then there are other items.

Our consultant was four months on-site doing Spectrum setup and working through issues. Sometimes there are bugs and the consultants have to reach out to support, themselves, and work through things. It's a very sophisticated tool, it's a very powerful tool. It's vendor agnostic. It doesn't matter what kind of infrastructure you have. They give you the capabilities to do many, many things. 

It's more on the complex side. It's not like some tools come with a bunch of out-of-the-box reports and things like that. Spectrum is not like that in terms of a lot of out-of-the-box things. They give you the functionality to get what you need, but you have to spend time to set it up. 

Riverbed was one of the other vendors we looked at. Part of the reason CA was attractive is, we did have them come out and set up a demo and a look through. We went through a checklist of what was important to us to evaluate.

The other vendor, we did not have them out. We did some demos with them; we already had some products from them. Honestly, we had a difficult time getting quoting and renewal for what we had. That was part of the reason. We did like the functionality that we saw from the CA. It didn't help that we couldn't get a good, invested communication from the other company that we did have products from.

I think you have to be aware of what steps you follow when you shut it down and bring it back up. You have to make sure you check that you are getting current alerts when it comes back on. Make sure that you did not lose any functionality, because there are a few pieces of it that are running simultaneously. You have to make sure all those pieces are running, operationally. There have been a few times where I started it back up and the alarms weren't coming in and I had to go check that. You just have to be careful to check the pieces.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor include:

• the cost of solution can be prohibitive, of course
• the functionality 
• how long the company has been around is a factor, obviously.

I give Spectrum an eight out of 10, just because of the issues with technical support.

I would make sure you grapple with the amount of time that it would take to use the solution and invest in the solution, to get what you need out of it. It's a powerful solution. It does take a skill set and time to set it up properly. It can do what you need it to do. You just have to spend the time to configure it. It's very customizable, which means you have to have a person that has the time to spend to customize it and get the data, get the reporting, events, alarms out of it.

There are some products that have all the intelligence built in but they're not as customizable. Some companies may like that. Spectrum, I would say, is not like that. Spectrum has all the functions there, but it takes a team of people to get that value out of it. CA does Professional Services engagements and they have guys that are subject matter experts that can go in and create all that value from the tools.

I think you have to make sure you understand, for the long-term, the skills of the team and what training may be necessary to get them up to speed. 

If you have a tool set like Spectrum that already is similar in the complexity, you may not have as much ramp-up time to get value out of it. If you have a tool like CiscoWorks, it does a lot automatically for you. That's not the same case with the CA. It takes some investment and setup and configuration to get those nice reports you're looking for. It's powerful because you can customize any type of report but it takes some skill and time to do that.

The primary use case is eyes on glass, operations, responding to tickets, alerts, and incidents tickets. Performance wise it is good. We have a lot of different monitoring tools in the background, so orchestration has been a little bit of a challenge, but I think that is everybody right now. Overall it is a good tool.

• The ability to quickly identify and isolate incidents.
• Automate ticketing

With the service manager today, we are moving the service now into the future.

A lot of the filtering and orchestration of the background takes a lot of manual work. There are a lot of processes involved and it is hard to keep it up-to-date with a lot of moving parts. Making it more dynamic could be better. 

Stability has been good. We really have not had any issues.

Scalability has been good. 

I have not personally used the technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It is good, but there is a lot of growth opportunity in the space. I think CA and a lot of other companies are moving in the direction of orchestrating cross-platforms. Right now, the way we are using Spectrum is really only covering infrastructure and infrastructures out of the house. I think the future with APM and other tools, being able to see more holistically what's happening, is very critical. 

The most important thing is implementation, how it is implemented to enable the operations. In my current role, the operation's visibility and usability are the most important thing. So, making sure it is implemented in a way that it meets the requirement of the operation space. 

We monitor our network devices with it, therefore it performs well.

The flexibility. It is so customizable. You can about make it do anything you want it to do, if you can figure out how to make it do it. There are things you can do in it to customize it to your environment and make it meet your business needs. I do not know if I have seen other products in this space that are as flexible.

We see events that we would not typically see. Thus, it helps us find things that we may not have known were wrong. It creates transparency and makes everything work by being more transparent.

CA is going in the right direction. What we want is more integration between the tools and it looks like they are doing more of that. That is probably the big thing. Better integration between the tools, being able to take all the data from the tools and having it available in one place, such as generate dashboards, analytical data, etc. 

I would like to see CA move Spectrum, Performance Manager, and some of their other tools moved to a SaaS based model. You see a lot of other manufacturers which are moving toward SaaS based models.

The stability is good. We have not issues in the two years that we have been using it. It is one of CA's more stable products.

The scalability is good. We have not scaled it a lot. We are getting ready to add another SpectroSERVER to it for redundancy. But from a scale perspective, it has worked out okay for us.

Technical support is so-so. It depends on who you get. Sometimes you get the runaround. Sometimes, I am not sure that the people that pick up cases know the product well.

You open a case specifically for Spectrum support, but depending on who you get, some of the guys are really good or knowledgeable. Typically what you find out is those are kind of the higher level people. Then, sometimes you get people that you do not get really good answers from, who make you feel like you know more about the product than they do. So, it is hit or miss. 

Sometimes, you have cases that may stay open for weeks. These are not complex cases. These are just questions about how to do something or if you can do a certain thing. It seems like it takes a long time to get an answer. It just depends.

The communities are probably a bigger help than actual technical support because you have a lot of other people that can provide feedback. Therefore, it is not terrible.

It was pretty straightforward. We actually had the CA Services guys come in and help us set it up. 

We were involved in the the set up and everything, but CA Services did the heavy lifting. They were the experts, so we did not have to have a ton of knowledge. So, the setup for us was pretty easy because we used CA Services.

We had HPE OpenView, SolarWinds, and OPNET tools. We chose CA because we can consolidate all of those tools down. This is why the integration is important. It has allowed us to eliminate a whole bunch of other tools, so we were able to consolidate, and that was a good thing for us.

It is a really good product, though it is very complicated. You need to make sure that you have the staffing, because of the complexity of the product. You will need staff to be able to use it to its fullest extent. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

The biggest criteria are:

• Functions
• Features
• Cost
• The reputation of the vendor.

There are a lot of little vendors out there that are in a lot of these spaces, but you have never heard of them. Therefore, it is good to have a large company that you know and you trust. We have a good account team and good pre-sales people. They have really help us out a lot.

Network monitoring.

It has performed very well, as expected. It allows us to be proactive with any sort of network issues, address the problems before they become critical problems.

Allows us to be proactive.

If we can be proactive, we maintain maximum uptime of our network infrastructure. It allows us to address issues before they take a network down, for example.

HTML5. Right now, it is a very Java driven application. We have lots of issues. If we do have any issues with the front end side of it, it would be Java. Dealing with Java and all the changes that are constantly happening with Java.

Stability is very good.

Scalability has been very good. I've never noticed any issues. I've used the product on a 2000-node network and on a 10,000-node network.

Tech support is very good. I've never had any issues.

We weren't using anything before Spectrum. We needed a product to monitor our network equipment for these type of things.

I'd say it's medium. You need to know how to tailor the product to your environment.

We looked at a couple of different products; I can't remember which ones, exactly.

When we are selecting a vendor, what is important to us are

• stability
• proven background of actually doing it 
• cost to actual functionality.

I would say to seriously take a look at Spectrum. It is a very stable and good product.

The use case for Spectrum is to perform fault management for our managed services infrastructure. We are monitoring around 150,000 endpoints with the tool. 

The root cause analysis, fault isolation engine, and the overall event management that Spectrum brings you.  

It drives topology based views. It gives us network visualization, and lets us detect faults. 

Definitely the way this product needs to go is more web-based. They need to put more emphasis in the web technology. There is some there, and it is being developed, but it is not all the way there. There is a Java fat client that they have not moved all the support from the Java client into the web and that is what they need to do.  

It is a very stable product. No software probably is without any downtime. There has been downtime here and there, but we have maintained well over 98% uptime with the product, and I have been using it for over 10 years. 

Scalability is one of the best factors of the product, because it scales horizontally. 

The CA support is pretty good overall. They get behind what your company is trying to do with their tools. Therefore, they try to understand your use cases and just be there as a partner to help you out.  

I was involved in the initial setup. It was pretty straightforward.

I would recommend this solution.

The event management that the tool provides is extremely powerful, but with that comes a bit of complexity. For beginner type users, the event management might be a little overwhelming, but as you work with it over time, you can really see what the solution provides for you. With a little bit of time spent, you can get a lot of value out of the product, but it takes a bit of time and understanding.

We use it as a fault-management tool for our networking devices.

It's performed very well. We're still somewhat in the infancy. We've got a new deployment of Spectrum so we aren't 100% fully deployed with it. We have it integrated with CA Performance Center, which is what our initial experience is with, and we're just now bringing CA Spectrum into the fold.

The quick notification of issues, quick alerting because timeliness is always valuable, it's very important for us.

Again, that's a little tough because we aren't using it to it's full potential right now. We're hoping for greater visibility into our network, not just for us but for our customers as well.

It's been very stable and very easy to work with.

In terms of scalability, we've managed to discover just about all of our devices. We're still working with configuring, so for what we're using it for, which is very bare bones right now, basically just up-down, it scales fine. As we add additional capability to it, that may change, but I haven't seen that yet.

Support has been very good. They've answered all the questions that we've had. 

We've had issues that were a "severity-one" so they hopped on it immediately. For issues that have not been as urgent, they've been very timely in their response as well.

We were using CA Performance Center, and CA Spectrum is a logical extension of CA Performance Center. Between our management and CA themselves putting on the full-court press for sales, we decided to go that route.

It was somewhat complex, but that's also a little difficult to evaluate because we had a consultant that was the primary resource for the setup, and he had some challenges. I think if we had had a different resource it might have been more straightforward.

We did consider two other vendors. We considered SolarWinds, and I can't remember the other company but that company didn't last very long. It was somewhat close between CA and SolarWinds, but we decided to go with CA.

In the vendor selection process what is important to us are

• reputation
• reliability. 

It also helps if you have a current relationship, and we have a long-standing relationship with CA. That made it rather easy for us.

I give it a nine out of 10 so far but I have to qualify this answer. It's done everything that we need it to do. Again, until we do a deeper dive and explore it to its fullest potential, that could change.

Whoever you have do your deployment and implementation, make sure they know what they're doing.