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CA Application Delivery Analysis [EOL] vs DX Spectrum comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CA Application Delivery Ana...
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
DX Spectrum
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (7th), Network Monitoring Software (17th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (18th), Network Troubleshooting (6th), DX NetOps (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1237194 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Director, DevOps at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Good monitoring functionality, but technical support and integration with other products need to be improved
My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances. For CA Spectrum, the integration of this product is something that needs to be improved. Even some of their point products to not integrate very well, and ADA is one of them. The user interface needs to be improved. Technical support needs to be improved.
PinchasAlbalya - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Monitoring has become centralized and management now sees real‑time health of key network assets
The time investment required is significant, not because of difficulty but because of the need for free time to invest in it. We need to get the knowledge. We know there are many options, but we took an external vendor to install and make the customization. If we want to make others changes without paying for customization, we need to learn it deeply by ourselves. The tutorials are very complicated. They could work on that area. The tutorial part could be more simplified. I know there are many explanations, and you can get help or documents in one click on the current page in the product, but it is not very clear. If you want to do something new that you did not see from the vendor in the installation, it is not very simple. The documents are good for people that know how to operate the product well, but for new users, it is not simple.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the fault management monitoring."
"The pricing is relatively low compared to other solutions in this area, and I'd go so far as to say it's even significantly less than the competition."
"Once it is setup and seeing traffic, it is an impressive tool to show potential problems long before the general users are complaining."
"Technical support is excellent."
"Everything being centrally located in one infrastructure management tool allows anyone anywhere, between the IT help desk, to Windows teams, Unix teams, or the network team to see exactly what devices are causing the issue, as well as the severity of those issues."
"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."
"Support has been very good."
"Thanks to Spectrum, we are able to monitor (and send out alarms for) our whole IT infrastructure 7/24 without having more than a minimal number of technical persons."
"I can use it to detect whenever things go wrong on my network."
"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."
"With the implementation of the shallow water approach, we've been able to significantly cut down on the number and duration of outages and the number of severities in all the categories."
"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."
 

Cons

"Hard to setup right, hard to get the conversations right."
"The user interface needs improvement."
"It is not the best product on the market, but it is better than the competition if you were comparing prices."
"My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances."
"Upgrades can be quite complex."
"When we have a high capacity of traffic, we have problems with the stability of the system."
"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."
"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."
"The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated."
"Our consultant was four months on-site doing Spectrum setup and working through issues."
"There is room for improvement in the integration with other non-CA tools and databases."
"The product should provide performance management features."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive solution and there is a single price to pay for licensing, with no options."
"Spectrum is expensive."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller."
"Since the acquisition by Broadcom, we have not had such a good experience with licensing and pricing. Since they were bought by Broadcom, every sales contract is getting complicated. It's very complicated, and it's much more expensive than before. It's not a good pricing strategy from Broadcom."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise90
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
The time investment required is significant, not because of difficulty but because of the need for free time to invest in it. We need to get the knowledge. We know there are many options, but we to...
What is your primary use case for DX Spectrum?
The university purchased DX Spectrum, called ICE. DX Spectrum NAC is working for us only on Cisco 9200 switches. It is not working on any other switch like C1000 or HG or any 2960X. Even other Cisc...
 

Also Known As

CA ADA, Application Delivery Analysis, NetQoS SuperAgent
CA Spectrum
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ERGO
National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Fortinet, Skyline Communications and others in Network Management Applications. Updated: October 2026.
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