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DX Spectrum vs OptiView XG [EOL] 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 (8th), Network Monitoring Software (21st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), Network Troubleshooting (6th), DX NetOps (1st)
OptiView XG [EOL]
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
MW
President at Bitwise Micro
A valuable, impressive, and portable product that saves time and has great scalability and stability
It just saves time. We have run into situations where contractors come in, and they plug in a WiFi device that is handing out DHCP addresses, which affects the rest of the network. To be able to quickly identify from where the problem is originating, you need a network tool that can identify the device that is doing this. It just brings into clear focus the exact issue when there is a problem or outage. When there is a crisis and you've several people wanting to know an estimate of when things are going to be back up and running again, you need to have answers. I have been at places that didn't have a tool like that. I know one place that had an outage for almost a week, and it was craziness. It turned out to be just a bad cable. That's all it was. They were having trouble with their email server, which was an on-premise email server, but emails were taking six hours to appear. The whole problem was because of a bad network cable. When I plugged in the Fluke analyzer, it analyzed and told me immediately that there were transmission errors on this one port from one switch. It told me this within 10 minutes. It is an incredible product.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For us, within that technology area, it is the standard for solutions that we can select, and we haven't seen a better product."
"We were able to standardize the internal processes across all internal departments, resulting in almost an elimination of non-standard process flows through our organization."
"It was used as a tool to observe critical alarms on network nodes and act immediately."
"The most valuable features of DX Spectrum are the comprehensive alerts."
"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."
"We can plan changes and replacement of end-of-life products in our environment very well because it's very accurate."
"This is a very good, refined product that, in the fault-tolerant configuration, approaches being bulletproof."
"It will aid in troubleshooting and daily operations, and is invaluable in fault resolution."
"Basically, what OptiView XG allowed us to do is, when someone says, "Hey, there's a problem, we're experiencing slow latency in a site", we put it on both ends and we look at the traffic going between both ends and see where the latency lies."
"Technical support was awesome; they were quick to respond, very knowledgeable, and kept us up to date on the status."
"OptiView XG helps us troubleshoot problems faster than we would normally be able to."
"For me, just resolving our one VLAN problem really makes it worth it."
"In this way, I think OptiView XG is the best all in one solution."
"Gives us the ability to see our network."
"We use it for all of our predictive Wi-Fi designs, and we get standards reports so we're able to do more of the designs more quickly and more consistently."
"When we do a capture, it gives us the details of where the problem is and what it could be."
 

Cons

"HTML5. Right now, it is a very Java driven application. We have lots of issues."
"It's very difficult to use and customize. In order to maintain the software, we need specialized help."
"The platform is complicated to use."
"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 the best product for availability and outages reporting."
"The graphical interface is still designed in an old fashioned way, and they should include some management views in a much more modern manner."
"The price is very high. It makes it very difficult with respect to the business because, with any other product, we have to look at a lower-cost licensing model."
"There is still room for improvement for mobile clients like tablets and smartphones."
"I think that the discovery of a network can be improved if the OptiView would recognize more kinds of devices independent of the manufacturer."
"Hardware is unreliable. It's already crashed on me several times."
"It takes some time to get used to it. There is always room for improvement in the ease of usability and learning curve type of stuff."
"With the cost it's hard to justify having more than one in our school."
"I think that the maintenance is ridiculous on some of the products, including OptiView."
"Also, the overall weight of the product is a lot to carry around for a long period of time."
"The price could come down quite a bit."
"Ease of updating, automated updating. Basically, based on the unit right now, maybe get it to be a little bit smaller, lighter."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing could be better."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"Currently, a perpetual license but some services are moving to a subscription"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Its price was a bit excessive. The device that I had died. It is under warranty, and they want $20,000 for another one. I just don't want to spend that kind of money, so I'm trying to find an alternate solution. They have annual maintenance on it, which probably was 10% a year, so it all starts to add up."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
11%
Non Profit
10%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise90
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise26
 

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...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

CA Spectrum
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
XG is used in all industries. Example customers include: Republic National Distributing Company, Titelive, CitiGroup, Los Angeles Unified School District, Saudi German Hospital, DeKalb County Schools, Valdosta State University, The Everett Clinic, Bio-Reference, Miami-Dade Library, Mitel, Borsa Istanbul, Cimarex, Air National Guard Lowndes County, High Point City, Carrollton City Schools, Kern County, Pruitt Communications and Bosch Group.
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