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

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
41st
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
21st
Ranking in DX NetOps
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (8th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), Network Troubleshooting (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the DX NetOps category, the mindshare of DX Performance Management is 27.4%, down from 34.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DX Spectrum is 24.7%, down from 30.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
DX NetOps Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
DX Spectrum24.7%
DX Performance Management27.4%
Other47.900000000000006%
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

"It's a solution which is highly recommended."
"It saves time having it all on one place, so you do not have to jump around from different tools and try to merge the data. It is already done for you.​"
"The ability to very quickly and graphically navigate around, being able to zoom in to a timeframe, apply it to all the other panels... are all very intuitive."
"One of the most valuable features is the ease of use."
"With this solution, we reduced about 15 performance management to only five machines."
"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 an 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, and this was the only solution that we really considered at that level."
"The feature that is inherent to its core, of being able to graphically represent a trend and status, is nice."
"It is easy to use, and the performance metrics are helping us to know our network better."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to put health checks in place not only for the infrastructure but for some of the services that are on top of the infrastructure."
"It is the perfect monitoring solution for customers' devices."
"An organization using DX Spectrum is more easily able to understand the root cause when something happens in its environment."
"The network mapping functionality."
"The most valuable features have been the interface and the ability to do equipment management."
"The main thing is obviously notifications about alerts, getting ahead of the curve to make sure that we do not have system going down, or if it is down we get to know it earlier."
"The quick notification of issues, quick alerting because timeliness is always valuable, it's very important for us."
"From the business perspective, they have improved MTTR significantly, creating an elevated ROI ratio."
 

Cons

"Today, tenants are bound to a data collector which requires a lot of networking and resources to configure."
"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."
"CA PM Business Hours Filtering does not always function properly; sometimes, when applying business hours to CA PM reports that are 30 or more days in duration, the report generation times out and does not display results."
"​Global synchronization errors. Sometimes it just doesn't finish in time due to the load."
"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."
"This solution is not very scalable."
"It seems like we escalate more than I would like to. If anything, they should look at how the tier support goes in place."
"I think it would be helpful having a more comprehensive set of certifications so that I could natively deploy devices to my environment and the tool would immediately recognize and immediately be able to provide relevant performance information without a lot of tuning on my part."
"I think they should improve or add advance performance reporting in the reporting part of Spectrum, they have recently replaced CABI with Jaspersoft in new version as a reporting integration."
"The documentation of this product is not very easy to understand without any screenshots or application windows."
"CA Broadcom support is very bad—one of the worst."
"DX Spectrum needs to incorporate faster support."
"HTML5. Right now, it is a very Java driven application. We have lots of issues."
"For us, the implementation was quite complex but it's because of the large number of different environments we're dealing with."
"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."
"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."
 

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. ​"
"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."
"They should provide more scalable licensing for the product."
"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."
"The tool's pricing is based on the number of network devices."
"I like the licensing model because it's device-based."
"DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable."
"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 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."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"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 price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which DX NetOps solutions are best for your needs.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

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: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.