DX Spectrum Reviews

Actually, the whole network is monitored with this product.

It helps out the infrastructure team to be more proactive. We know about the problems at the moment when they occur.

It's very difficult to use and customize. In order to maintain the software, we need specialized help. The usability is an issue for us.

I have been using this solution since 2012.

We lost our database at the end of 2016, and we spent weeks trying to restore it.

There were no scalability issues, as such.

We don't use the CA technical support itself. Instead, we use the partner's support. The word that best describes it is insufficient.

I used another solution in another company, but in my current organization, the solution was already installed.

The great aspect about the CA Spectrum tool is not what it does, but the integration that it provides with the other CA monitoring tools, such as CA APM.

The setup was complex. The installation is complex with CA products. They involve a lot of steps and customizations.

I really don't recommend it for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

It is absolutely necessary to hire the installation service, along with the license.

Again, this solution is not for SMBs. Look at Gartner Magic Quadrant, as there are other options available that are more reliable.

However, if you have a complex scenario with lots of integration with other monitoring tools, namely IT service management (ITSM), project and portfolio management (PPM) etc., then this is the right one for you.

We evaluated other solutions, namely OpManager, Zabbix, Nagios, Ipswitch, and WhatsUp Gold.

• Event Correlation
• Relationship between the services delivery infrastructure
• Policy creation by events
• Root Cause
• Attribute monitoring
• Integration with other tools

It helps to detect the exact root cause of the element that is causing an incident in the infrastructure.

There is a need for the separation of monitoring models as a log, Windows service, etc.

I have used this solution for seven years.

It is a very stable tool, even in distributed environments.

The technical support is at a high level.

We have not used other tools. This solution gives more stability, capacity, quantity and quality, in regards to the monitoring configurations. Besides that, it is an excellent event manager.

The initial configuration is simple. It becomes complex, as the monitoring is more specialized.

The price is high, as compared to other solutions.

We looked at other free products, namely Nagios and Zenoss.

It is an excellent tool for monitoring, managing event correlation, and providing integration with other tools.

With Spectrum, we are implementing a unified monitoring system. We have also purchased CA APM and Agile Central to complement Spectrum and have an ambitious plan to integrate these systems. This will increase the effectiveness of the IT department and will give us the comprehensive view we want to make better decisions that support our business needs.

Spectrum is very useful for us, because the product lets us monitor and control all the various components of our infrastructure that support our business from an IT perspective.

We are also beginning to implement SOI, in order to view our IT infrastructure from a business perspective. As the boundary between business and IT become more confusing, it becomes more valuable to our users that we in IT can easily and quickly understand the impact of IT services within the business. SOI and Spectrum allow us to achieve this. We can optimize the IT services we offer our users and get a quick view of the business impact. Then, we can adjust priorities and solve problems quicker.

From the users perspective the looks and feel of dashboards of Spectrum would be easier to use and for understanding as APM will be in 10.5 version which we saw in CA World.

Also, from our point of view, It´s necessary that CA people in charge of Spectrum tool, work more in order to better integration between Spectrum, with APM, SOI and UIM.

We had some stability issues at the first, but CA resources in Argentina assisted us in to solving these problems. They also helped to fine tune our configuration to support the solution. In the early stages, we implemented a simple configuration of Spectrum, so sometimes we faced up-time problems. But that was due, in part, to the design we implemented. So, now we have implemented a more robust design with more servers and more robust databases. The solution is now stable enough to support the challenges we want to monitor.

We have not experienced any scalability issues, because we used a step-by-step approach. First, we implemented Spectrum at a pilot with branches. We use a dashboard that allows us to monitor the components at our 110 branches to support our products. Next, we applied the same idea to our strategic and critical challenges in website and mobile applications, as well as in our retail and corporate business.

Customer Service:

Very Good, from CA and from Partners

Technical Support:

Technical support is very good. In Latin America, they have good technicians, particularly in Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Whenever we need support on a difficult to solve issue, CA brings in specialists to solve the problem quickly.

Before choosing Spectrum, we used an open-source solution called Nagios. We also used a monitoring tool from BMC called PEM, Patrol Enterprise Management. In 2009, our bank decided to implement the complete suite of tools for IT management and delivery from CA. It's a strategic decision that we took six or seven years ago and we're happy with the switch.

Initial setup was easy, but in the initial stages we need more support from CA and our CA partner in order to understand the capabilities of Spectrum and how to take advantage of all of this.

Yes, from IBM

When we evaluate vendors we look at technical skill and background. We want them to be able to understand our business objectives and our needs. This is the most important. We want them to be more service oriented than product oriented, because the main objective of the IT department in a bank is to maintain up-time regardless of the challenges we face. This is critical to our business.

• NCM
• Discovery: Scheduled, on-demand, synchronized with eHealth
• REST API
• Spectrum integration with CABI, eHealth, SOI, and EEM
• Modelling of custom device models
• MRTG graphs in real time for interfaces
• Dynamic Global Collections
• Distributed landscapes
• OCC console client
• Web UI console
• Integrated GIS maps
• Self-certification
• Condition correlation
• Event configuration
• OOB Probable Cause database
• MPLS Transport and VPN managers
• Watches and thresholds

CA Spectrum allowed our client, a Tier 1 TELCO, to manage their E2E network infrastructure. The distributed architecture and eHealth integrations enabled a powerful solution for providing Hosted Managed Services to an Enterprise customer. It proactively monitored Enterprise: GMPLS, IPVPN, ISDN, LTE and Leased Line services against set SLAs and maintained a top quality of service.

The easy integration of topology views to a web portal allowed the client to expose actual real time performance and health status of enterprise infra setups. This greatly benefited the client by providing a "wow" factor to their consumers/customers.

• NCM: Needs to be more user-friendly and refined. The ability to quickly see changes across various time configured backups helps to quickly identify changes which could be a root cause to a prevalent problem due to incorrect configurations.
• MRTG graphs need to be more intuitive.
• The GIS map feature needs to be enhanced and synced with topology views of containers and global collections.
• The probable cause database needs to be enhanced.
• As Cisco and Alcatel lose out to cheaper competition like Huawei, ZTE, etc., device certifications need to be updated.

We have been using this solution for four years.

Scheduled discoveries with modelling of large numbers of multi-element devices like switches, MUX, SAN, IP-DSLAM used to freeze up the SpectroServer in r10, although such issues were not faced in r10.1.

We didn't encounter any issues with scalability.

CA Spectrum Technical support is very good, especially the ready availability of extremely skilled technicians across the globe, 24/7.

I am not aware of any previous solutions.

The setup of the distributed SpectroServer is complex for large environments, including the integrations with distributed eHealth environments.

It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller.

CA needs to cut down its pricing strategy.

HPE OV and CA IM2.0 were tested, but were found either lacking in scalability or user-friendliness, including the lack of a modern, crisp UI.

It is a great product. It is easy to setup if technically strong resources are available. It reduces the cost of underlying hardware due to the higher monitoring capability per server. Always stick to a distributed approach as it helps in fault tolerance due to the unavailability of HA/DR.

1. NCM – Network Configuration Manager – It is very helpful in maintaining the configuration backups of network devices in a multi-vendor ecosystem involving large number of devices. Device configuration changes can be identified on real time and helps administrators to identify unapproved changes and recover from faulty changes leading to device downtime quickly. Reference configurations are helpful in setting a device configuration and naming convention benchmarks and enables admin teams to work without dependency on resources, as the proper and standardized configurations can always be referred to during making changes to devices.

2. Discovery – CA Spectrum’s discovery utility allows IT/NOC teams to find and model the network and view the topology in the Universe and Global Collections views. Bulk discovery is possible to be run using seed files providing the device IP address and using pre-configured policies containing the list of SNMP community strings. This way large networks can be discovered and modelled in one go. It allows us the flexibility to choose the elements to be modelled and how to model them. The inventory data can be exported in desired file format for further review and distribution to key stakeholders. Device changes can be re-discovered into CA Spectrum using the scheduled discovery feature, ensuring that device changes do not place a device model in risk of getting out of live monitoring and avoiding incorrect alarms.

3. Spectrum Integrations –

a. CA BI – CA Spectrum uses CA Business Intelligence (CABI) for reporting purposes. The flexibility offered by CABI to design user defined reports and display data in a variety of info graphical formats lets admins design reports which can display to management in a glance the state of entire network/ sections of the infrastructure. CABI leverages the powerful SAP BO technology which offers a complete suite of information management, reporting, query and analysis tools in a user friendly and intuitive UI.

b. eHealth – CA Spectrum – eHealth integration offers functionality to map existing eHealth elements with the Spectrum device models to allow eHealth generated performance based alarms to be shown on Spectrum alarm dashboard against the relevant device element model. This creates a single pane of glass view for the NOC teams to view all fault and performance alarms in a single dashboard and helps in reporting and carrying out triages to determine RCA of faults. Also, detailed OOB designed eHealth reports are made available to users of Spectrum on a single click and discoveries can be scheduled on eHealth using only CA Spectrum system. Thus, it eases the system administrator’s job while providing a in-depth analysis of the entire network’s state and performance in real time.

c. SOI – Integrating CA Spectrum with CA SOI is now easy using the CA SOI connector. It helps to collect CA Spectrum data into CA SOI, convert it to a common format and expose the data for visualization, analysis,, management and reporting to organizations senior management. It helps to get a management view on a distributed and large network into a single dashboard view including Cis and alerts consolidated into a single frame. The entire infra can be broken down into logical business services and thus impact of faults can be analyzed on services running / hosted / provided by the underlying infrastructure easily.

d. EEM – This integration enables SSO feature for CA Spectrum. Single Sign-On (SSO) lets CA Spectrum users integrate with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and Active Directory user management systems.

e. API – CA Spectrum provides web based and REST API for integrations. We found it very useful in creating a custom solution to monitor dynamic IP based devices. It can also be used in embedding CA Spectrum information in web sites or third party apps and fetching data into CA Spectrum especially updating custom attributes of device models with data from external systems.

4. Dynamic Global Collections – Global Collections allow us to model network views from any modelled elements in Spectrum. By specifying rules based on device naming convention/IP address/device type etc. we can dynamically add models into various global collection views as and when they are discovered and modelled in Spectrum. These views are very helpful in breaking down the entire network into logical segregated views based on any criteria which fulfills your business use case.

5. Interface Information - You can view information about the interfaces of a device model by selecting the model and selecting the Interfaces tab in the Component Detail panel. The Interfaces tab displays a list of the configured interfaces and sub interfaces for the selected device, along with the parameters of the interface models. The % utilization (In/Out), packet, errors/discards (%) rates can be viewed in graphical format and thresholds can be set to generate alarms.

This product automates much of what is involved in monitoring. For instance, device discovery can be performed in any of a number of ways with minimal manual intervention. The model catalog in Spectrum (digital models for various physical or virtual devices) is very extensive so, in most cases, monitoring uses device models that precisely match the actual device. This provides excellent tailored monitoring ability. Spectrum can be set up as fully fault-tolerant and in that scenario, it can provide near 100% monitoring up-time; five-nines monitoring up-time is certainly attainable.

A good example would be our world map. This organization is international. We built a zoom-able world map in Spectrum depicting every company site in every nation and US state. The maps provide a true “at a glance” view of issues across company sites. Roll-up is user-definable. The maps are also very popular with visitors and customers since they are attractive and it is obvious at a glance what they depict. The fact that Spectrum provides the ability to build and link these maps is a real plus.

CA works continuously to upgrade this product, adding new abilities and fixing bugs. They do a very creditable job. The areas I am aware of that could use improvement are fairly minor; for example, the ability to sort lists in the Discovery Console. Things like that. CA provides a good customer feedback mechanism they have dubbed “the idea wall”. Suggestions for improvements, expansions, etc., can be posted there. These ideas are often incorporated into CA products.

I have used this product for six years.

Occasionally, usually after an upgrade, we see a few issues but these are almost always cleared up quickly by opening a case with CA. The only “stability” issue would be very occasional problems with the “Archive Manager” component (manages the event DB) stopping and requiring restart. I would characterize stability issues with Spectrum as rare.

We had no scalability problems at all. Spectrum is a supremely scalable product. The recent upgrade of Spectrum to 64-bit has dramatically increased the already very good scalability.

Technical support for CA Spectrum is excellent and seems to me to be in a state of continuous improvement/refinement. I would rate the technical support as 95/100.

This organization previously used the IBM Tivoli product.

Setup is relatively straightforward and with the support of the CA technical staff, it proceeds very straightforwardly. Spectrum can be implemented entirely on virtual devices, as it is here. Training is available and purchase usually includes a certain amount of training credits.

We evaluated IBM Tivoli and BMC Patrol/TrueSight.

This is a very good, refined product that, in the fault-tolerant configuration, approaches being bulletproof. Allow extra time for installation, setup and familiarization. This is not due to installation and setup complexities but more due to the richness and extensive capability of this product.

The most valuable features start with the core feature fault management and then the Configuration Manager; Service Manager; Watches; event management and event correlation; MIB tools; and the fact that it is fully customizable.

CA Spectrum as a fault management tool from a service provider perspective, turns your network management team from reactive to proactive, minimizes the network management staff number requisite, and gives you a centralized view of all your network faults. From a customer perspective, it assures you about your network health and availability. The configuration management feature relieves you the burden of manually saving all yours devices configurations. It allows you to massively upload standard configurations to a group or to all your network devices. The service manager feature allows you to look at your network devices as a collection of assets that plays a role on a service instead of looking at them as an individual network asset. I could give you much more examples.

There's always room for improvement! In order of importance, I would say that CA should start to get rid of Java on the OneClick console. They could highly improve the Configuration Management feature, the schedule manager and the watch's allowed types and formulas.

I have used CA Spectrum for eight years.

The most stable version I've worked with was the 8.1 and the 9.1.3 running on Windows Server 2003. Every versions running on Windows Server 2008 (R2) that I've worked after that (versions 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4) have had some issues either with OneClick/Spectro Server communication (hanged alarms for instance) or with global loss of SNMP communication with network devices, or DDMdb increasing indefinitely or with some unexplainable SSDB crashes. I haven't worked yet with version 9.10 but I am pretty sure that the 64-bit architecture was a huge improvement for the platform performance.

The DSS (Distributed SpectroServer) deployment is quite good for scalability. The only issue with it is when you need to discover connections between devices that stand in different SpectroServers (different pollers). You cannot find relations between them at all! The only workaround I know is to duplicate the devices that are doing the bridge between whatever you have in one poller and the other poller in both pollers!

Although they behave differently depending on the zone you are in (US, Europe or West Asia), for basic and common issues they are good. For more advanced (models database issues for instance) or specific issues (monitoring interfaces running HSRP for example), they will struggle with it and most likely won't be able to give you a solution! If you want to fully explore the features of the platform, you will need to dig it by your own. One curiosity detail about CA regarding CA Spectrum is that as they released new versions of CA Spectrum, they start to hide the deepest features, such as the creation of different model types in the catalog database. You can still do it but, if you want documentation of it, you need to go to look for it at Aprisma and/or Concord documentation (these are the previous vendors of CA Spectrum). If you start with customization issues, even if they are well documented in the manuals, the support will most likely advice you to contact the CA Special Services and close your issue.

I didn't use a previous solution. I've always worked with CA Spectrum.

Depending on the operating system, you may need more or less pre-install tasks (installation user privileges, hosts file configuration, then in Linux you need specific packages, disable or configure IP tables, or in Windows disable UAC, DEP, firewall, etc.). The platform installation is straightforward. Always use dedicated servers for CA Spectrum and if you have the chance to, install the platform in virtual machines making snapshots at important checkpoints. It will spare you a lot of work and troubles.

In my former company we had a per device licensing. I'm not aware of the values.

I've been working with CA Spectrum since my first work day. I was never in a position where I could take that kind of decision.

Try to test and tune every feature you want to implement in a controlled environment. CA Spectrum is a powerful solution that will allow you to do almost everything you ever needed to monitor your network infrastructure. Due to its many features, there are always multiple ways of achieving the same goal. Picking the most efficient is the hard task. For every monitoring/management challenges that you face, you have always the last resort alternative, which is using your own scripts/programs to interact with CA Spectrum Web Service, VNMSH, or even adventure yourself (re)writing Java code using the CORBA API.

The most valuable feature is the detection of minor, major and warning alarms, showing through different colors. Spectrum is not SOI, but it gave the possibility of putting a view, a dashboard, showing servers that were part of a VMware server architecture.

The response detection of an incident was very low, that is, I could work more efficiently and effectively in my incident management. Many times, the customer did not even notice the unavailability of the service.

I did not see the best level of usability.

We used it from August 2014 through May 2016.

I did not encounter stability issues. Even when the client disconnected because of a network problem, there was a change of state that would allow me to do some troubleshooting.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

The technical support level from Vectra Consulting and Services was highly specialized.

Recently, I opted for an open-source tool, due to the budget constraints of the place where I currently work.

Initial setup was complex because the client's infrastructure was very complex. Besides, we had another supplier that did not pass along complete information to the Spectrum configuration.

I am not aware of the pricing and licensing, since this information was kept by Vectra Consultoria e Serviços or with the client (a public body).

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate alternatives, but I already knew how to listen.

I would say that if you have the financial budget to get this solution, you would be well taken care of.

• Ease of administration
• Topology
• Root cause identification
• Design

Our company is sectorized and each area has its role in the process, where the administration and support of the assets are executed by specific areas. However, the operation and NOC 24x7 require quick, visual understanding and with clear alarms to trigger the affected team as soon as possible, minimizing impacts.

I work in a data center with more than 2000 assets to be monitored. We were able to clearly identify the root cause of incidents visually and with specimen alerts with the topology design.

There is room for improvement in the integration with other non-CA tools and databases. With some items that I scored, I have noticed that there have been significant changes in version 10, such as the WebClient.

We have some information collected by proprietary tools and some data stored in applications with our own development and we have difficulties in integrating/importing/exporting data to update and maintain the data.
Regarding the functionality of version 10, even though it is still in the stage of deployment and maturation, we realize the WebClient functionality already attends to much of the need following the occurrences without depending on the implementation of the Java client.

Another improvement I noticed in the new version was the greater capacity of absorbing devices in the same SpectroSERVER, facilitating the administration/maintenance of the tool and reports.

We have used the CA Spectrum solution for about 7 years.

There were no stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. In version 9, we had to scale up due to the expansion of the assets to be monitored; however, there were no problems. With version 10, we had improvements since it supports more assets in the same Spectrum Server.

Technical Support is essential for monitoring activities. We use it frequently, as well as consulting hours, to identify improvements and best practices.

We tested other tools to see how well they met our needs; however, we did not see satisfactory results, and they had the same functionalities as what we already used.

As we operate in partnership with CA, we have had more input regarding implementations. The greatest difficulty is to understand the topology and to design the best possible way of implementing it to identify the connections.

As I am from the technical area, I do not have much to say about the financial aspects.

The company tested tools to verify functionalities and possible integrations, but has always adopted market tools with a quality standard to be able to provide it as a service in our portfolio. We have been unsuccessful in testing other tools for the features we are looking to serve with CA Spectrum.

Planning is key. Identify the topologies and design to be implemented and rules to be conducted for problem identification and alarms. Ensure that you have good support as a partnership for difficulties.