DX Spectrum Reviews

Our customers use the software for network monitoring.

It is a complete and ready-to-use tool. It has many features compared to other competitors.

The product is complicated to use.

I have been using DX Spectrum for around 12 years as a consultant.

I rate the stability of the product an eight out of ten.

We have four users for DX Spectrum. It is easy to scale. I rate the scalability a six out of ten.

It is deployed on the cloud and has an easy initial setup process.

It is an expensive solution compared to other tools in the market.

DX Spectrum's graphical interface is high quality and easy to use. I rate it an eight out of ten.

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.

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

• 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.

There are several features that are valuable:

1. Fault management of different devices from various vendors;
2. Integration with different application from other vendors is supported; and
3. Various features to configure/customize/scale as per business requirements.

1. It has a highly scalable architecture that is designed to ensure accommodation of the growing network setup for our client.
2. The improvised fault management reduces the time to detect faults and to get required teams to address issues by email or ticket.

The documentation of this product is not very easy to understand without any screenshots or application windows.

It's also expensive for the company.

I've used it for five years now.

If prerequisites are followed, there will not be major challenges during deployment.

In case there is/are any problems during deployment, CA has 24x7 support.

If database size is large and any corruption occurs, it takes a considerably large time to fix the issue.

We've had no issues with scalability.

I'd rate customer service 8/10.

I'd rate technical support 8/10.

We did not use a previous solution.

We implemented it through a vendor team. I'd rate them 9/10.

It's worth investing in if monitoring of critical assets is a priority for your organization.

Functionality of the tool is awesome and it is easy for customers to use. It is a very good solution for monitoring network and servers of the organizations.

0% outage and I have a detailed view of root cause analysis for any unavailability of the servers/network/applications.

Code is very complex.

I have been using CA eHealth, Spectrum, SOI, EEM, Nimsoft, and ITCM, for six and a half years.

Yes sometimes we have issues, but with the help of CA E2 level engineers, we get fixes for bugs that are encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

The best, 10/10.

The best, 10/10.

We used to have Nagios, OpenNMS, etc. but they are not very efficient monitoring tools when compared with Spectrum and eHealth.

Not complex. CA technical guys were there to help if there were any issues and technical documentation at support.ca.com helps a lot.

We used a vendor whose expertise was 8/10.

I recommend CA tools for monitoring the entire infrastructure in an organization.

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.

It's a mature product and has been around for a long time. The technical support is up to speed and it has been well designed.

It gives us a visual representation of what's going on in the network. It hasn't helped me personally but it has helped the network. We haven't moved on to the latest version yet but integration with UIM will be one of it's benefits.

It is not so much in regards to the product itself. In my opinion, it's the documentation that I find is not up to the mark. Instead of reading 400 pages, if they could just give me one simple example, it would make things a lot easier because it's a very complex product that does a lot of complex things. I would like to have illustrations on how to do the simple things as opposed to sending me a link that refers to 400 pages of a manual; it doesn't help. Saying “select the criteria” is meaningless if I don’t have the basic knowledge of what the criteria means or why I’m selecting it.

It is very stable.

The product is very scalable as well.

We have used technical support. It's hit or miss. Sometimes you get people who are really good and sometimes you don't. However, you can usually escalate quite quickly.

Our company was partially using CiscoWorks before this product.

I would definitely recommend this product to others.

The most important criteria whilst selecting a vendor is reliability.