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DX Spectrum vs Riverbed SteelCentral WebAnalyzer [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 (18th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (19th), Network Troubleshooting (7th), DX NetOps (1st)
Riverbed SteelCentral WebAn...
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
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.
it_user539928 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
I was able to monitor two key applications that were hosted externally.
WebAnalyzer includes support for Ajax transactions, while this is invaluable, it becomes difficult to provide a big picture analysis of pageviews AND ajax transactions. The APDEX score is calculated on pageview response times. Some applications use Ajax extensively to imitate desktop applications. This can be confusing if you only look at Pageview times.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easy to navigate."
"Allows us to have a single console/notification point, with the alarms of all the tools that we use for monitoring."
"With the timely alerts that our MTTR reduced, we could determine the impact of the outage as well as the root cause of the issue."
"The initial setup is very easy; after 10 minutes, you have a complete Spectrum up and running and you can start discovery immediately."
"We were able to clearly identify the root cause of incidents visually and with specimen alerts with the topology design."
"Everything being centrally located in one infrastructure management tool allows anyone anywhere, between the IT help desk, to Windows teams, Unix teams, or the network team to see exactly what devices are causing the issue, as well as the severity of those issues."
"CA Spectrum enables us to have an overall view of the state of our network."
"The event management that the tool provides is extremely powerful, but with that comes a bit of complexity."
"In deploying WebAnalyzer, I was able to monitor two key applications that were hosted externally."
 

Cons

"No good technical support from CA."
"There should be better integration with other Broadcom products, like network performance manager. Currently, for every part of a product, you need a separate server environment. You have something for Spectrum, you have something for network performance, and you have something for NetFlow. There are a lot of islands and server farms with different technologies. They should be redeveloped to get one platform for all."
"I would like to see better scalability, and maybe, a more intuitive user interface. ​"
"It's very difficult to use and customize. In order to maintain the software, we need specialized help."
"The only area which I found that can be improved is that sometimes issues come up with alert clearing i.e. alerts don't clear when triggered and clear events occur too fast."
"The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated."
"For us, the implementation was quite complex but it's because of the large number of different environments we're dealing with."
"The CA Technologies sales team destroyed their relationship with our business units."
"Clients are manually installed. This makes mass deployments impossible."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 solution's pricing could be better."
"Currently, a perpetual license but some services are moving to a subscription"
"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."
"In general, the license cost will be about 30% of the total TCO for this tool (hardware/support team, OS costs, and OS management)."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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...
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Comparisons

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Also Known As

CA Spectrum
AppResponse BrowserMetrix
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
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