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DX Performance Management vs DX Spectrum comparison

 

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
57th
Ranking in DX NetOps
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure Capacity Planning (2nd)
DX Spectrum
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
21st
Ranking in DX NetOps
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), Network Troubleshooting (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the DX NetOps category, the mindshare of DX Performance Management is 35.7%, down from 40.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DX Spectrum is 33.3%, down from 41.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
DX NetOps
 

Featured Reviews

Sandip Kheni - PeerSpot reviewer
The vertical database loads faster than any other product available
We experience disconnections between the solutions own components. In the last five years, there have been many intermittent connection issues with the four components and we still don't know the reasons. The solution has issues when loading groups that have been created in the application interfaces. It would be nice to have a mobile application. In the current industry and technical word, the mobile phone is the only thing that is always in your hands. Other Broadcom products have mobile applications but the solution doesn't offer one. It would be great to view device parameters and view or download graphs from a mobile device.
Umair (Abu Mohaymin) Akhlaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Good for monitoring, covers networks well
If you are looking for the right monitoring tool, Spectrum is one of the best solutions. It covers networks very well. It has all the capabilities that you're looking for when it comes to monitoring. Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing. If you have a CA Service Desk, then it can be integrated so that if you have open tickets they can be closed automatically. The configuration manager is great as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"What is most useful is visibility."
"Scalability is the reason we bought the product to begin with. It was designed from the ground up for carrier-grade services, and we are in effect a MSP ourselves. So we were really interested in looking at something to be able to handle the multi-tenancy and scale as large as possible. This was the only solution that we really considered at that level."
"Since the implementation of the tool, it has cut down on probably 60% of our outages and letting us know what is going on."
"It is the gathering of the whole performance data in our environment and our network environment, for us and our customers."
"There is a good amount of vendor certification which comes with the product. That's all factory-loaded, no need to load any custom-made files. Most of the metrics are calibrated and captured from the devices based on the defaults available from vendor certification."
"I can get it to run a report showing, for instance, what root drives are in the critical range in terms of being full, like 90 percent full, and disseminate that information to the other areas of the organization."
"You can have thousands of devices inside and hundreds of thousands of interphases without a problem."
"Discovery: Scheduled, on-demand, synchronized with eHealth."
"Allows us to have a single console/notification point, with the alarms of all the tools that we use for monitoring."
"It is very stable. We have not had any major issues in over 10 years."
"The granular access control that it provided so that you could only see devices that were related to what you were working on was great. I couldn't see the entire inventory of devices. I could only see the ones that were related to my work. It has got a very granular access control component."
"The product’s stability and robustness are valuable."
"We can plan changes and replacement of end-of-life products in our environment very well because it's very accurate."
"The Global Collections are what I found to be most valuable. With the Global Collections, you're able to organize and categorize devices into "folders," or functional groups and categories, so that it doesn't matter which SpectroSERVER those devices are on."
"The most valuable features of DX Spectrum are the comprehensive alerts."
 

Cons

"Since we are out of registered IP space, we are moving to ipv6 and we expect our vendors to move with us, and they have not delivered yet."
"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."
"This may be available by now but for server space, when it comes to the disk file system, I'd like to see that graphically represented, or the trend, rather than what I'm seeing now."
"Spectrum's topology view sometimes does not rebuild automatically when a device is shut down and reconnected."
"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."
"The quantity of views which are tied to specific metric families is too high. Also, the problem is the view doesn't tell you which metric family it uses, so you don't know why you don't see data."
"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."
"There are some areas in the technology right now, like with VMs, where we are lacking with our abilities to get inside the VM to monitor traffic within the machine."
"Needs better integration with all the other products in the Agile suite of tools; anything they could do to make that less complex, would be great."
"For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts."
"The platform is complicated to use."
"The GIS map feature needs to be enhanced and synced with topology views of containers and global collections."
"The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated."
"DX Spectrum should have an automatic ticketing mechanism with ServiceNow."
"DX Spectrum could be improved by them getting rid of the Java console. It would also be better with Turkish language support."
"The solution could improve by allowing the ability to monitor the network shortly after installing the software and adding an auto-discovery function."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The tool's pricing is based on the number of network devices."
"They should provide more scalable licensing for the product."
"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. ​"
"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."
"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 price is very high."
"It is expensive compared to other tools in the market."
"It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"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."
"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 price of the solution is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
31%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about DX Performance Management?
The tool helps us understand network performance.
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 do you like most about DX Spectrum?
The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Spectrum?
We are a customer of Broadcom, we use a group license that covers various CA products, including DX Spectrum. The company purchases the licenses they need from this group license, and we do not hav...
What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
DX Spectrum should have an automatic ticketing mechanism with ServiceNow. I need to use other tools for event management. It has a dashboarding mechanism and monitors devices and network switches t...
 

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: April 2025.
845,589 professionals have used our research since 2012.