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DX Spectrum vs IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact comparison

 

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

DX Spectrum
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (11th), Network Monitoring Software (30th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (29th), Network Troubleshooting (8th), DX NetOps (1st)
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

DX Spectrum and IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. DX Spectrum is designed for DX NetOps and holds a mindshare of 24.3%, down 32.5% compared to last year.
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact, on the other hand, focuses on Event Monitoring, holds 3.8% mindshare, up 2.8% since last year.
DX NetOps Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
DX Spectrum24.3%
AppNeta by Broadcom34.7%
DX Performance Management27.1%
Other13.900000000000006%
DX NetOps
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact3.8%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management11.8%
OpsRamp9.4%
Other75.0%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Hennie Du Toit - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Specialist Architecture and Governance at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Event management strengthens with automation but needs better event flooding handling
Better handling of event flooding in IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be beneficial. If there are massive issues with power, for example, and we get millions of events, then it struggles to deal with that. Better root cause correlation and faster processing for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be helpful. If there can be more end-to-end functionality, such as observability tools built in natively, that would be great. With correlation, IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact has many functions, but we've built them custom-built. Functions such as automated logging, automated dispatching, and automated notification of engineers could be native in the tool.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"DX Spectrum uses an SNMP Trap to accept all the details, especially for device monitoring of faulty devices, allowing me to use Spectrum effectively."
"It gives an depth report of availability and outages, and by using it you can further analyze and find exactly where the bottlenecks lie."
"The Spectrum tool improved our network assurance levels for our business units."
"This is a very good, refined product that, in the fault-tolerant configuration, approaches being bulletproof."
"DX Spectrum has been great for us; it's the strongest available, the main problem is the pricing, but it's in accordance with the features."
"Monitoring window, graphical representation of devices, automatic updating of databases, high scalability, high robustness, and user-friendly options are some of the most valuable features for us."
"Out of all of the CA products that we use, I would say this is the most stable."
"I found Spectrum as being a complete network management solution with a great user friendly GUI."
"The most valuable feature that comes with Netcool/Impact is the ISPF APA support. It is inherent to Netcool/Impact, so I can use the ISPF of any other product, which I can invoke and consume through Impact, and do integrations, which is great. I run the Netcool desktop application so I can integrate with other applications in the ticketing system. It's a great ability being able to invoke ISPF and integrate."
"The stability has been very good for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact, rated around eight or nine."
"The operational views and third party connections to fetch the data and to help engage on more activities are the most valuable aspects of the solution."
"I can recommend Netcool/Impact because it's the perfect solution when it comes to invoking ISPF APA and using ISPF integration throughout the rest of your other products."
"It is easy to integrate with other models such as Oracle, other systems, external systems, and to reach events."
"The solution is great at being able to fetch almost any kind of file."
"This product allows us to make use of open-source products, including running Java code."
 

Cons

"Huawei devices are not properly supported, and there are incompatibility issues related to certain protocols."
"We want to make our own choice for the AIOps solution and do not want to be forced to use the Broadcom OI solution by default."
"Our consultant was four months on-site doing Spectrum setup and working through issues."
"Make it easier to certify devices."
"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."
"Reporting and network bandwidth monitoring features needs to be improved."
"The report area is very poor and we cannot work properly with additional information and the custom reports."
"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."
"For improvement, I'd say the dashboard and the overall GUI could use some work. Although, I don't think that there's much improvement that Netcool really needs to achieve in this area, because when we're talking GUI, Impact is able to integrate with any third-party system and it comes with ISPF APA. It's more beneficial than Netcool/OMNIbus in this respect, and it's quite easy to handle."
"Better handling of event flooding in IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be beneficial. If there are massive issues with power, for example, and we get millions of events, then it struggles to deal with that."
"The solution is somewhat complicated. It's not exactly straightforward."
"Stability-wise, this product needs to be improved."
"The solution is somewhat complicated. It's not exactly straightforward."
"For improvement, I'd say the dashboard and the overall GUI could use some work."
"IBM is not investing in the development of the on-premise version of this solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is expensive compared to other tools in the market."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"In general, the license cost will be about 30% of the total TCO for this tool (hardware/support team, OS costs, and OS management)."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"The price is very high."
"The licensing is yearly, and although I'm happy with the pricing I do think it could be better."
"Licensing of IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact depends on the number of nodes on the element that you are monitoring."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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...
What needs improvement with IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?
Better handling of event flooding in IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact would be beneficial. If there are massive issues with power, for example, and we get millions of events, then it struggles to deal wit...
What is your primary use case for IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?
IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact is our event management tool, specifically the umbrella fault management tool set. All of our events across the network correlate the data for us, and we have certain use ...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact?
We remain a partner with IBM Tivoli and continue using their products. We use IBM Tivoli NetCool Impact's AIOps functionality. We experienced some skills issues, but currently receive assistance fr...
 

Also Known As

CA Spectrum
Tivoli NetCool Impact
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Claranet, Consolidated Communications, Telus, €sterreichische Bundesbahnen (€BB), Telekom Srbija, Bendigo Community Telco, Capgemini, Schweizerische Bundesbahnen (SBB)
Find out what your peers are saying about AppNeta by Broadcom vs. DX Spectrum and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.