DX Spectrum Reviews

We use it for monitoring our applications. Mainly, it open systems to make sure that the databases are up and running, and also the service is up and running. It has become a notification before the business lets us know the system is down. We get to know the system is down first, so that is its main purpose.

It has been performing well. We have had some kinks here and there, but overall it has been good.

The main thing is obviously notifications about alerts, getting ahead of the curve to make sure that we do not have system going down, or if it is down we get to know it earlier. If it is going to go down or if it is down, we get to know it earlier. If it is going to go down, we also get to know it because if the servers degraded and so on, we get to work on it before it really has any business impact.

It is mainly trying to avoid disasters that might be coming, especially with service degradation.

It has improved the way our organization has functioned over the last 10 years. It has had some positive impacts.

Once something goes down, that is when we get alerted versus we need more predictive analytics in place so we know a case based on patterns putting AI in place, or something along those lines, so we know that there is a pattern growing that the systems going to go down. Therefore, it becomes preventative versus reactive, so that is one area of improvement that I can suggest from a product perspective.

I would recommend AI capability built-in so it becomes more predictable and we jump ahead of the curve. This is the one really important feature I would really like to see in any product that provides alarms. 

It has been pretty stable. We have had no problems with Spectrum. 

It has been maximized in terms of the usage. We use if for every possible application, from an application server or to be put on the server itself, monitoring the server, database, etc. You name it we have used it everywhere. 

We are a kind of managed services, so I do not have that information.

This was before my time at the company.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

This was before my time at the company.

I would recommend Spectrum.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. The product needs to meet our needs. 
2. It has to pass Enterprise Architectures conditions and be secure. The product should not have a lot of holes, because if you're going to buy a product, you are going to look at the product first, then the vendor. 
3. From a vendor perspective, it is always associated with what the licensing terms are, and obviously, money matters. Also, looking at the contracts, how flexible they are in terms of working with us on working towards a contract. Whether it be subscription or it is a SaaS product. How we license that product is what I am mainly looking at.

Spectrum is our correlation engine and an integration point of external monitoring tools. Also, we send UIM traffic to it, then we forward it onto SOI.

• The correlation
• The integration point

The biggest issue is our integration right now between UIM and Spectrum is lacking. It does not allow us to pass all the details. There is a new integration, which has the new version of UIM. I hope it clears up everything.

Spectrum has been very stable.

I do not think we had any scalability issues with Spectrum. We have one of the largest environments, and it is handling it just fine. 

For Spectrum, it is good. For other things, we have had some issues. We had a six day outage once on SOI, but we worked with CA to try to improve that. 

The negative is they have a tendency to ask us to do things that basically we have already done, like balance a service or disable all the policies or something like that. You can tell, they are just walking down a script. This not going to help; logic says this is not going to help anything. 

It would be helpful if they would try to look at the situation and decide this is something that really needs to happen or not. Instead of just doing it to say they have done it.

I was not involved in the initial setup. However, the biggest issue is setting up some of the custom traps is a little complicated. So, you have to have someone that really knows the tool. It could be a little more intuitive overall.

It has many great features, but in most of the companies that I have done consulting for, they rarely use them as it requires an advanced level of knowledge of the tool.

Event Configuration: A tool in its simplest form creates business logic around events. For example, generate an alarm if Event A occurs and if Event B doesn’t occur within 30 seconds. In its hardest form, you can create a custom state machine for very hard business logic.

Event Correlation: Spectrum has out-of-the-box correlation, but with this tool, you can create custom ones. You can make some alarms hide inside another alarm as a symptom, get root cause analysis, and avoid unnecessary notifications/alarms on the screen.

Topology view: The topology diagrams on CA Spectrum look very nice and they are very useful. We stopped using them because with more than10K devices, the administration was just too painful.

Dynamic models: Integration with the CA Spectrum is awesome. Sending traps with the third-party tools and using the SBG to receive them requires a learning curve. However, once you get it, it is very simple. Unlike another tool, you don’t need to know what the third-party tool is monitoring. In other words, if it sends some data, it will be dynamically created in CA Spectrum.

Reduces the false positives, by creating our own business logic with the Event Configuration.

Allows us to have a single console/notification point, with the alarms of all the tools that we use for monitoring.

It’s like having a Ferrari, without a professional driver. Most companies don’t use all the good features. The out-of-the-box features are just too poor: (Ping, CPU, Disk and Memory, Process, and File Systems). CA Spectrum is an infrastructure monitoring tool, that comes with a few easy to configure metrics, such as Ping, CPU, Disk & Memory, Process and File Systems. However, these metrics are really basic, actually we can do better with Nagios or any other open source tools in the market. In my experience, most big companies, that have CA Spectrum only use it for monitoring these basic metrics, i.e., where the real benefit is not there. If you only want it for this purpose, then there are better and cheaper options available.

It’s mostly for SNMP.

It doesn’t give you performance metrics: You need CA eHealth for this.

Some of the benefits of this solution (also mentioned above) are:

Event Configuration: It can easily (for an expert) create any business logic such as it can alert first, if you receive 2 events from Type A. If you already alert this kind of alarm and it happens again, then do it only, once every hour.

Event Correlation and Root Cause Analysis.

Service configuration (model a service).

Southbound Gateway integration – It can integrate with any other solution and dynamically, create models on CA Spectrum.

Alarms (impact, root cause, symptoms, etc.)

Watches – It can create custom metrics, besides the basic ones that I have mentioned before.

InfoView – It can create custom reports.

Topology view – This one is really difficult and time consuming, but awesome, if you can do it right.

Most companies spend money on the license, but they don’t have a good administrator, to make use of all the good features. So they end up with a really expensive tool, that does only the basic things, which any tool in the market could do probably better. But, the good features of CA Spectrum, only a few monitoring tools can actually do.

I have been using this solution since 2011. I got the CA Spectrum Professional Certificate in 2011.

It is very stable. It rarely fails and you can have a high availability implementation.

Scalability and performance are great. We use both Nagios and CA Spectrum. We can say that Nagios needs around four times more servers than CA Spectrum needs.

I can’t really tell in regards to the technical support. It depends on the guy that answers the phone (Latin America). They have a really excellent technical guy who helped us a few times, but most of the times, the guy that answered the phone knew less than we did.

It was the first solution that we used when I started working. Right now, we are trying Naemon (Nagios). Here is my comparison:

Raw monitoring:

Naemon has a lot more flexibility, i.e., you can script and monitor anything with it, giving you more options than CA Spectrum.

Performance:

CA Spectrum is a lot better. The way they have for consulting SNMP in bulk is great, thus reducing the load a lot. It has around four times more performance with CA Spectrum.

Administration:

CA Spectrum offers you templates, Discovery tools, menus, etc.

In Nagios, we had to develop our own administration tools in order to discover and maintain over 10K devices. This needs a high understanding of the solution.

Business logics:

Here, it is a big win for CA Spectrum. With the events, you can make any of them interact with each other, even with different devices. I can’t think of any business logic that I wouldn’t be able to implement. (I am not saying it is easy, but with a lot of thinking, most of them could be done).

In Nagios, each service runs as an individual check.

The setup is complex for a big environment such as primary servers, slave servers, high availability, and fault tolerance.

If you have a small environment, it is very straightforward. You have the SpectroSERVER, OneClick, and database on the same server, although the recommendation is to split them.

However, the out-of-the box features are very poor for the price, since you are paying per device. You need to use the other features to make it worth it.

It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly.

Try to learn, at least, the following:

Event Configuration

Device Certification

Watches

Alarm Notification Manager

Services

SLA

The alarm and root cause analysis features are the most valuable to me. These features help to pinpoint causes of outages and performance issues.This ultimately identifies the specific component responsible for an issue thus accelerating problem/issue resolution.

It has helped to accelerate issue resolution.

I supported a client running this solution for about four years.

There were no scalability issues. It integrated easily with the other third-party solution.

CA support was good.

The client had always used CA Spectrum from its inception.

The setup was pretty straightforward, as with most of the monitoring tools. The setup's implementation and the support were straightforward, with the documented support provided.

CA Spectrum is expensive. CA should really consider this factor, as smaller companies would prefer to go for cheaper monitoring tools instead.

The customer considered SolarWinds. They eventually opted for CA Spectrum because it proved to manage and monitor their large infrastructures more effectively.

The recent versions of the CA Spectrum, such as version 10, have new added features that give organizations a good ROI.

These features are core requirements for infrastructure management:

• Topology Discovery
• Configuration Management
• Best network root-cause analysis
• Service management
• Integration with CA SOI and CA SDM

• Reduces system fails
• Reduces time to resolve issues
• Gives a clear picture about device usage: Not in terms of performance, but in terms of roles

Sometimes customers use network equipment which does not solve any business tasks and can be simply switched off.

It's a mature product for a classic network.

New areas (NFV, SDN, APM) are covered by new technologies. As such, products should have tight integration with modern data science platforms.

We have been using the solution for over ten years.

It's the most reliable product I have used.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. However, we don't have a large number of devices. We only have 10-15,000 devices for a distributed arch, which is normal.

4

The technical support is professional.

I work as a System Integrator and we sell all known NFMs. Spectrum is the best.

The setup was straightforward.

Implementation fully ourself

I don't have any specific advice regarding this.

We also evaluated Comarch, EMC, HPE, IBM, WANDL and TEOCO.

Don't freeze your selection. This product is mature and is the best. Start your project and move forward to solve business issues

• Network Configuration Manager
• MPLS & VPN Manager
• Southbound Gateway
• Event Rules
• Event Procedures

By using event rules and procedures, we got an improved event management process. CA Spectrum is very useful for event handling and brings us a robust “manager of managers” console.

SpectroSERVER fault tolerance (FT) functionality: The OneClick console should have a native HA or FT functionality. Actually, the only way to get this is by using a load balancer.

SpectroSERVER is the core component in CA Spectrum architecture which polls devices into the network. You can use multiple servers to build some kind of "cluster" to provide continued device polling when some server fails. A OneClick console (web server) is front-end of CA Spectrum, and it does not have an option to provide continued user access when a OneClick server fails (High Availability). You can use a Load Balancer, but is very expensive.

We have been using this solution for seven years.

SpectroSERVER and reporting databases can grow quickly. If you don't take care of trap storms, this can cause SpectroSERVER crashes and performance issues in the reporting.

No scalability issues were encountered.

Customer service is very good. I would give them a rating of 10 out of 10.

The North America technical support team is excellent, 10 out of 10.

The LATAM support team has some things to improve, six out of 10.

The initial setup was complex because it requires a deep knowledge about tool architecture and proprietary software. In some cases, if you make a mistake during the installation or the initial setup, the better solution is to reinstall or reinitialize some DB.

We implemented the solution through a vendor team. Their level of expertise was high, nine out of 10.

Licensing is usually expensive, but cost efficient.

We evaluated IBM Tivoli Monitoring.

I recommend the use of CA Spectrum mainly to monitor network infrastructure. Use this tool like a “manager of managers”. Event monitoring is a very powerful functionality.

If you want to monitor servers, apps, and databases, then use CA UIM probes.

Implemented with Enterprise Customers across region. Very strong Fault Management tool , Extra ordinary correlation & alarming. Not to difficult to implement but eventually adv. correlation is not easy to implement.

It helps our customer in managing the events , correlations & creation of auto tickets with CA Service Desk. Eventually it helps customer in automation.

Its not performance management tool for Network Performance Management you need to have CA UIM or CA eHealth.

12+

We encounter multiples issues , difficult to list all. Some of them far beyond out of the box implementation. Other CA Support helps us to resolve it.

No

Not at all .

Customer complains it lags for performance management which CA has other solution of it.

4-5 No good technical support from CA

CA NSM, Solarwind

its depend on the scope of project. But initial setup is not difficult for this solution.

We are solution implementer , and we had implemented across various ent. customer.

Different customer has different.

Pricing generally is high but you need aquire multiple products in order to accomplish complete infrastructure management. Cant get everything with CA Spectrum alone when it comes to network monitoring. Netflow is not there too.

Yes

Root cause analysis, fault isolation, customizations, and CA support tech access.

It decreased our downtime.

Interop between server/agent based monitoring (UIM).

We have been using this since the early 90s.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Technical support is the best in class.

We used many, including HPOW, NetView, and Nagios.

The initial setup was straightforward to install. Then it’s a rather big leap between basic usage and pro-usage. Spectrum is VERY tech advanced in its core, compared with other tools on the market. But that doesn’t show up until you do a more advanced type of monitoring.

Maintain a good relationship with CA.

My role does include a continuous monitoring of other products on the market, but none are near Spectrum’s root cause engine, which really is what it is all about.

Try to see through other product’s GUIs and focus on backend core features. How does the product isolate faults? Do different modules have to work together to triage root cause?