No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

CA Application Delivery Analysis [EOL] vs DX Spectrum comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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 (8th), Network Monitoring Software (16th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (18th), Network Troubleshooting (7th), 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

"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the fault management monitoring."
"DX Spectrum is a very good solution; it's the best network monitoring tool in the market."
"The way our network is structured, CA Spectrum seems to be able to deal with problems that we have coming up in real time."
"It's easy to implement, very configurable, and you can easily add new alerts and watch lists so we can certify new devices and watch the behavior of these new devices out of the box."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can model a large variety of devices and receive SNMP traps from them."
"Easy navigation from initial alerts to a full topology and detail on the Network infrastructure and it relationships is the most valuable feature"
"It provides us complete visibility into both company networks with one tool, which we didn't have."
"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."
"The presentation layer is pretty simple and straightforward and the dashboard is pretty easy to read."
 

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."
"It does crash sometimes."
"I’d like to see better access to data elements via the API as well as better elements for the UIs."
"Code is very complex."
"When we have a high capacity of traffic, we have problems with the stability of the system."
"The configurations are still XML-based and require a good deal of coding to setup each object for monitoring."
"The price of DX Spectrum is not competitive when compared to other solutions, such as SolarWinds. The high price has caused us to lose many deals."
"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."
"Stability could be improved. I find on a regular basis that those of us on-call tend to usually have to go in and restart or reboot a Spectrum server because the landscape's gone down."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive solution and there is a single price to pay for licensing, with no options."
"DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable."
"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."
"It is expensive compared to other tools in the market."
"The price is very high."
"Spectrum is expensive."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Management Applications solutions are best for your needs.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Outsourcing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.