DX Spectrum Reviews

Without a doubt the most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability. This is what Spectrum is known for and it's delivered on this for us.

It's also flexible and is able to manage all device types.

It gives us insight in to our overall network communication, and it has joined groups together within our company to share information.

I'd like to see cross-landscape correlation. Right now, things are in individual nodes, and we'd like to be able to have them integrate or work together better.

After the complex setup, we've had no issues with deployment.

This solution is extremely stable, and it has proven this across years of use.

Customer service has been outstanding. They are always there when we need them and we appreciate them.

Technical service has been outstanding. They are always there when we need them and we appreciate them.

There were three companies we looked at. Spectrum was chosen for its flexibility, for its ability to manage all device types, and ease of growth for our environment. Nothing scales like Spectrum.

It’s complex, we had consulting on site for several years.

We also looked at IBM.

We are very pleased with it. Plan, learn your environment, and plan the implementation. This is essential for success. Also, get CA support to help you document your environment before you start.

It's easy to implement. I've used it for 15 years so I may be biased, but that's also a testament to how easy it is to use.

It's also very configurable. You can add features as you'd like. For example, you can easily add new alerts and watch lists. We can easily certify new devices and watch the behavior of these new devices out of the box.

You can add scripting and export results to an external database. It makes it easy to use and sort the information in a way that can be helpful to you. I could go on for a week about it.

Currently I'm happy they went to 64 bit, which has just finished. I haven't thought about other improvements; maybe better reporting. Currently, it's using BOXI/CABI, which is terrible as it’s unclear and I don’t like this.

I've used it for 15 years. We use Spectrum on the network infrastructure for five to six clients. We also sell it as an integrator to other clients as well.

It’s very, very stable which is the core benefit, and it’s also very easy to maintain. It doesn’t need much maintenance once it's set up. The strongest point of the product is it's stability.

Last year they didn't do a lot of development, and when they did it, it wasn’t secure enough. Each version took a long time to be stable, but it's gotten much better. Now it's totally stable, but 9 wasn't stable. 9.4.0 wasn’t stable, but 9.4.1 is. Overall, version 9 has been great.

It's quite scalable. You can easily set up a distributed environment with more than one central server. We currently have it scaled up to 5000 devices on one central server (high for Belgium), and once they release v10.1 it'll be even higher, I've heard.

We're very happy with the technical support. Once, I wasn't that happy, but now I've taken technical sessions with them and they've been helpful. Many technical engineers who are assigned to me actually know me to some degree, but this is for their product. Performance management wasn’t as good, and their service for this is superior.

Before we were using the HP solution, but then CA bought them. We like this vendor becuase of the strong network management system. So, what’s important to me is particularly the product more than the vendor. Vendors that integrate would be a nice plus. That’s the main reason we initially actually stayed with CA because the products can talk to each other, which has a good flow.

This is my job – to start form nothing and then help others set up. I also help others use it as well, so I scale it up for myself and others, and CA has been helpful.

Get an overall perspective. CA is helpful and you should be willing to talk to them.

• Root cause analysis
• Configurations management
• Device compatibility features (buit-in, MIBs and device self-certification)

Not from my organization, but for our customers. They managed to monitor their infrastructure at a deeper level, more detailed and technical specific view (NOC-like and NOC-compliant features), and of course at different levels (IT management, IT operational etc.). Also, by integrating with other products like CA Unified Infrastructure Management or CA Service Desk Manager, you can achieve a greater value.

The graphical interface is still designed in an old fashioned way, and they should include some management views in a much more modern manner.

I have been implementing it for three years.

Spectrum is a very stable product. It is a mature product, with a long life time in CA’s portfolio, and even before.

Spectrum is a very scalable product. You can add more than one SpectroServers for balancing and availability.

It's very good, 10/10.

Very good, also for device self-certification, development. There is also a very strong community (actually multiple communities) – 10/10

I have used and implemented the old product, CA Infrastructure Management, which included Spectrum, but also I am implementing CA UIM.

The initial setup is straightforward, and after the initial setup you can start the device discovery. You can configure multiple discovery profiles and schedule them as you please. After discovery, you can see devices and servers in the universe and you can start to manage them.

The configuration is easy, but it depends on the device’s technology. The discovery is very easy to do and the topology view is customizable.

Although Spectrum is an easy to install and have it ready to use product, it is a very complex solution and it can be customized in so many ways. So, for large environments or NOCs I would definitely recommend specialized implement team like from CA’s partners or CA Services.

The other option from CA is CA Unified Infrastructure Management, but it lacks for configuration management feature. It is positioned differently on the market.

I do not know any other product better for NOCs. When you start researching for this kind of solution, you should have prepared a list with all your devices you want to manage, and features you want from this solution. Usually the number and type of the devices is important.

Don't consider this product a service desk product. It is an infrastructure management product with some light features for incident management. Spectrum is great for what it does as a management tool. You can monitor your infrastructure, manage events and alarms as you please (aggregation, alarm suppressing, thresholds, rules, etc.), manage configurations for network devices (depends on the management capabilities of the device), monitor SLAs and other great stuff like these.

There are a number of features that make this product to standout from other competing products:

• Easy implementation with scalable architecture
• Seamless HA capabilities with no issues
• Integrations with other products including both north/south bound capabilities
• NCM - Network Configuration Manager for Device level configurations
• Expert CA support for the product.

In our environment, I have implemented CA Spectrum in HA. There is also Spectrum SOI integration for alert forwarding. We have created global collections to group the infrastructure with policies applied as per requirement. Also the SANM (Spectrum Alarm Notification Manager) has proven to be very useful for managing critical devices and immediate action to be taken with email notification etc.

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. CA should come up with ways where the alert is not valid, Spectrum should be able to re-verify and take action accordingly.

I have been using CA Spectrum for more than four years now. These four years include:

• Implementation of the solution in production environments
• Setting up of failover (High Availability)
• Integrations with other CA products like CA BOXI (for reporting), CA Service Desk (for ticketing), and CA SOI integration through connectors

No issues with deployment.

Never faced any issues with scalability. As the network infrastructure grows, to add new Spectrum servers is very straight forward with almost zero defects in existing architecture.

With expert CA Support, issues with the product can have a quick resolution so 4.5/5.

CA Spectrum is one of the products from CA which has great technical expertise to support it.

I have been working on Spectrum from day one but I have experience with other similar products. I found Spectrum as being a complete network management solution with a great user friendly GUI.

The best feature of this product is the simplicity of its architecture, which, once understood, makes the implementation very easy. I have never ever faced any issues with the initial setup.

I have implemented the complete initial setup myself. I have also done implementation with failover (High Availability) and integrations with other EMS products.

There are other similar products from IT majors IBM, and HP but we found Spectrum to be the most suitable for all of the major requirements of my organisation.

I would definitely recommend going ahead with the product. It will able to answer most of the network management related requirements of any organisation.

Availability and outages reporting is valuable.

It gives an depth report of availability and outages, and by using it you can further analyze and find exactly where the bottlenecks lie.

A lot. Decommissioned servers availability and outages keep showing and that is annoying because it's ultimately contributing to the final availability (actual) which it should not.

I've used it for two and a half years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I've never had to use it.

I've never had to use it.

I didn't use a previous solution.

It's a bit complex.

55%-75%.

No other options were evaluated.

It's not the best product for availability and outages reporting.

• Alerting via SNMP traps
• Inventory
• WAN modeling
• Serial numbers, etc.

Before this product we used a simple product that just used ping to verify devices were up.

• MIB database needs to be more up to date
• The software needs to be more tunable
• CA has a one size fits all model
• The application is not well written. You could throw 10 CPU’s and 20 Gig of memory at a database server and it will only use so much. This is running on Windows 2003 Server 64-bit and the CA Spectrum application is supposedly a true 64 bit application

I've used it for 10 years.

Yes, in a large environment working with CA engineers we ended up doing it three times. They had a different vision of how it should be done.

In the beginning very much so, we are now at a point where it’s pretty stable.

It scales, but each time you up scale it, more or less, you need to rebuild it.

It's poor.

It's poor.

The previous product did not scale and it was very basic. If you need enterprise network and server monitoring & alerting there are very few options out there.

It's complex for an enterprise. For example, we have three database servers and one web server for our environment.

CA support sent a field engineer out for the initial installation, and then a different one to fix it because it kept crashing,

This product requires, in larger environments, one full time employee dedicated to it.

• NCM backup
• Ease of going through the event history

The product was underdeveloped at our organisation for various reasons, so I am unable to comment.

Mainly testing on CA's side!

I've used it for 18 months.

Yes, multiple issues were encountered. Most were related to the lack of testing and inadequate documentation.

Yes, IM was very shaky and it seemed like CA were throwing hotfixes at us to fend us off until the next release.

No issues were encountered.

5/10.

8/10 but 10/10 when they were pushed.

Yes, we used Nagios, and SCOM. It not my decision to switch and I don't know why.

You either know how to deploy such a system or you don't. the manuals were 5/10.

We used an in-house team.

We also evaluated HP Openview.

Spectrum is designed for large infrastructures, anything less than 4000 devices and it is probably a waste of money

• The ease of discovery of managed devices into the tool set
• The ease of placement of managed devices into the tool set
• The integration with CA Service Desk
• Email integration

Since Spectrum is integrated with our Service Desk, implementation alerts generate a USD request which then fire off notifications to the responsible engineers.

The ability to import new MIBs and manage new devices.

I've used it for nine years.

No issues encountered.

Only if the server that hosts the application is restarted without bringing down Spectrum. If this occurs it corrupts the database and has to be restored from the backup.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

Yes, we used TNG, which was impossible to manage.

It was straightforward. It has the ability to discover your environment and devices easily.

We used a combination of an in-house team and a vendor team. The expertise of the vendor team was good.

For network management, this application is by far the best.