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DX Performance Management vs DX Spectrum comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

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

DX Performance Management
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
38th
Ranking in DX NetOps
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure Capacity Planning (1st)
DX Spectrum
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
17th
Ranking in DX NetOps
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (18th), Network Troubleshooting (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the DX NetOps category, the mindshare of DX Performance Management is 25.4%, down from 36.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DX Spectrum is 27.0%, down from 35.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
DX NetOps Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
DX Spectrum27.0%
DX Performance Management25.4%
Other47.6%
DX NetOps
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1810893 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Operations Specialist at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Flexibility and detailed performance stats enable effective network monitoring
Spectrum is very good at monitoring all network faults and configurations. It enables me to take action based on network issues. The Performance Management provides detailed network performance stats, including CPU, memory, and interface bandwidth. Additionally, Spectrum is flexible and allows me to organize and treat devices uniquely without impacting other devices.
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

"With this solution, we reduced about 15 performance management to only five machines."
"The out-of-the-box dashboards are valuable, in terms of being able to visualize performance data in ways that we haven't in the past."
"Great dashboards and good integration with other solutions."
"What is most useful is visibility."
"When we deployed it, right out of the box we were able to stand up Performance Management within two weeks, in our production environment, with full discovery and relevant information, actual information, that we could use in our command center, our 24/7 operations center."
"The licensing is very straightforward; it doesn't matter how many devices you have and would like to monitor, it's very straightforward."
"My sales representative, I would not trade him in for the world. He has done a really good job. I am really happy with him.​"
"It gave us one location, one place to do all of group administration, and to build dashboards, and device administration, inventory counts... it really reduced our overall administrative overhead."
"It is very stable. We have not had any major issues in over 10 years."
"​Stability has been good. We really have not had any issues.​"
"DX Spectrum uses an SNMP Trap to accept all the details, especially for device monitoring of faulty devices, allowing me to use Spectrum effectively."
"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 integration point."
"The most valuable feature is the event correlation mechanism."
"The most valuable feature is the auto-discovery, which is nice because you don't have to do anything to add a new component."
"The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability."
 

Cons

"DX Performance Management should increase high availability. If one of my two data centers goes offline and the other is operational, I need a seamless transition from the primary to the secondary data center. It's crucial to maintain consistent monitoring of the devices during this transition. Therefore, I require continuous, 24/7 monitoring of my system using this tool."
"We experience disconnections between the solutions own components."
"The certificates are not complete. CA needs to provide more support for the product through certificates."
"I would like to have more tasks, graphs, and possibilities for linking to the graphs and reports added to the solution."
"It could be a little easier to integrate new metrics."
"Product has issue collecting IP SLA data."
"I have mixed feeling about the scalability. I feel like there are things which are being put into UIM right now that are not being included in Performance Center that we need to see in Performance Center. We are kind of being driven to buy UIM, and I can't justify it.​"
"We would like to be capable of reporting network performance with a report strictly focused on the times outside business hours, which CA PM does not currently support. We have discontinued the use of the Business Hours Filtering until CA engineers are able to resolve or offer guidance."
"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."
"It's not easily scalable."
"SpectroSERVER and reporting databases can grow quickly if you don't keep track of trap storms; this can cause SpectroSERVER to crash and performance issues with reporting."
"Customer Service: It's poor. Technical Support: It's poor."
"The platform is complicated to use."
"There appears to be no intelligence within Spectrum itself, for example if we were to move a network device to a different switch port, it will see the neighbor as being available, but the link or switch port as down."
"A lot of the filtering and orchestration of the background takes a lot of manual work."
"The interface is not nice and needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We were looking at other vendors in the marketplace for NetFlow, and CA just beat everybody else in price, cost, and the size to implement. ​"
"The tool's pricing is based on the number of network devices."
"We purchase a license to use the solution every three years and we have multiple contracts. They have been increasing the price annually. We have a baseline for three years and then we need to pay the difference from the baseline, and we are in the process of negotiating a new price for all the licenses we need. The price overall is affordable."
"I like the licensing model because it's device-based."
"They should provide more scalable licensing for the product."
"Do your homework and know how many devices you will be managing out of the gate. Be sure to project what your growth will be each year."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"The cost of some of these products are a little cost prohibitive, which is unfortunate. We have to find lower cost solutions for some of the things that we have to pull in. For the most part, CA has capabilities in pretty much everything that you would need. You just have to figure out where are you going to spend the most money for what you have to actually get done. You can do all these things but, which ones do you have to do? And that's hard to choose sometimes because you want to do them all."
"Spectrum is expensive."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"In general, the license cost will be about 30% of the total TCO for this tool (hardware/support team, OS costs, and OS management)."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"It is expensive compared to other tools in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
23%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise90
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with DX Performance Management?
Spectrum's topology view sometimes does not rebuild automatically when a device is shut down and reconnected. It requires manual discovery and rebuilding of the topology, which I hope can be improved.
What is your primary use case for DX Performance Management?
I have used Spectrum for monitoring all network faults, configurations, and troubleshooting network issues. It provides network performance stats, such as CPU, memory, and interface bandwidth detai...
What advice do you have for others considering DX Performance Management?
I would recommend this solution based on its functionality, flexibility, customizability, and ease of use. Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. I am just a customer and not a par...
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 Performance Management
CA Spectrum
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Jack Henry & Assoc, Target, CenturyLink, Bell Canada, BrightHouse Networks, Telus, Unisys, Verizon, Southern California Edison, GEICO, Fidelity Investments, Wells Fargo, American Family Insurance Group, Deutsche Telekom AG 
National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Find out what your peers are saying about DX Performance Management vs. DX Spectrum and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
920,929 professionals have used our research since 2012.