DX Spectrum Reviews

Most valuable to us are the alerting capabilities and the topology information that Spectrum provides, as well as additional services such as device updates and the ability to launch them. These are typical network management services.

It provides us complete visibility into both company networks with one tool, which we didn't have.

I'm not familiar with all the current features and all its capabilities. I only know what it can do now. It suffices for what I need.

Spectrum already collects system information as SNMP data. What I additionally would like to see is utilization information. I only get alerts when the CPU reaches certain thresholds. I believe it does the same thing for links when links reach a certain threshold. I'm interested in statistical gathering. My primary job function is to determine why applications are slow, why customers experience latency, and related issues. I need to diagnose quickly whether its utilization, device failures, or if it's something beyond that. If so, that requires another tool altogether and I need to take a look whether Spectrum provides that type of information.

I haven't seen any problem. I'm a user, I'm not the administrator.

We will have to wait and see if Spectrum can handle both networks. Together both networks consist of about 6,000 to 6,500 network devices.

I have not used technical support.

Our company merged with another company, and since the merger, our company has outsourced all our LAN and WAN management. All our network tools have been at our vendors and we have had no access to them. Pre-merger, the second company did everything internally and used Spectrum as their network management platform. Now, with the integration of both networks, network management is coming in-house.

I recently attended a conference primarily to take a look at the CA Spectrum product and its capabilities regarding what advantages it's going to have when they bring in it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Riverbed Technology has a similar product that does network monitoring and gathers statistics. The classics, such as HPE OpenView and other similar products were considered.

Define what you need and talk to the various vendors. You don't need multiple platforms. The ideal situation is where you have a single platform and a single company that provides me with all the features and functions that I need. You need to have a very clear idea of what you are doing before getting into it.

The feature that I find most valuable, but I don't see used often enough, is really applying the fault tolerance. In the last two companies I've worked with, they always categorized or contained different type of devices. There were routers in one box and firewalls and other switches elsewhere. They really shoot themselves in the foot because you need to be able to understand in the grand universe what's breaking down where and why. Where on the path is the issue occurring?

Even though this seems to become a very strong part of the application, it's not really being applied because people want to categorize and put everything into little boxes. They don't really understand global collections. That's where you would categorize devices by types or something of that nature. That's something I've been trying to promote in our own company to really get a better sense of a more organic view of the network. We can then see if the problem is with a server, a switch in between, a router, or a firewall. We want to know where along the path is the issue occurring.

We are using Spectrum as a conduit for other tools. For instance, we are bringing in SystemEDGE to send traps. We are going to use that to replace NSM, which is an old tool that is not supported by CA anymore. This is our replacement for auto-ticketing, and things of that nature.

When I joined the company a few years ago, they were looking for significant ways in which we could reduce incident tickets, severity tickets, with the different severities, to monitor the duration and improve repair time. With the implementation of the “shallow water” approach, we've been able to significantly cut down on the number and duration of outages and the number of severities in all the categories.

The biggest benefit is really getting away from Java, because of the way Java is a tool that needs to be updated all the time. We found a lot of issues with users not being able to log in because the Java version on their PC got updated and is no longer compatible with Spectrum. Getting away from Java was a nice touch. We'll be integrating UIM, and we're probably going to be putting PM into Spectrum, as well. We will be integrating all those into that particular tool. I like that aspect, as well.

They really need to work out some bugs. Getting away from Java is a good step. I'm looking to see how well we can integrate performance manager (PM) and UIM into that, and see how they all play together. I've got a distinct feeling that there's going to be difficulties that are beyond what they're advertising as to how nice and easy it's going to mesh them together. I think there's a lot of work that still needs to be done in that aspect.

I would like to see easier integration and implementation of device MIBs. I usually find that, whenever we go to add a new device, the MIBs haven't been certified yet. This is a painful process to get them working in order to find alerts, associate cost codes with event codes, and things of that nature. If they can make that process easier, that would be fantastic. That's probably the biggest challenge I found; when I'm dealing with event codes and making sure that they are processing things as necessary. We need them to understand what's coming from the end boxes that are throwing the traps.

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. Then we have to worry about rebuilding databases whenever there's patching. This has gotten better with the latest releases, but we've still got to resolve that issue. For quite a few years, we'd have to go and sit there and wait for patching to occur, so we can go and repair all the databases after the fact because Spectrum couldn't shut down the database fast enough before the reboot.

The stability is a lot better than eHealth. I noticed that eHealth was not being talked about a recent CA conference. I like the fact that they doubled the capacity, apparently, and they're going to be doubling that again pretty soon from what I heard. eHealth is obviously being put out to the pasture. I agree with that because it is old technology and needs to go away. This is why my company's actually looking at PM and that kind of stuff to replace it.

I like the scalability for sure. It's definitely helping out because we're growing in a huge way. We could go from 10,000 to 20,000 devices, and then that might even go up to 40,000 devices. This solution might be able to keep pace with the growth that we're seeing. As far as end-user equipment work setup goes, I don’t think it will be scalable.

I tend to be on call on a rotating basis, so whenever there are issues, I am one of the folks at the repair site on my weekend. I try to fix problems and issues. In terms of CA Tech Support, I'm sure I've got a reputation because I didn't really like it when they decided to push a lot of off-shore tech support on us. I really fought against that, and thought that it was not appropriate for the kind of contract that we had with them. I let them know that I don't care for how often they want to push professional services on us as a “fix it issue”.

I came to this company when the tool was already in place, but I was involved with the latest upgrade. I was not a lead engineer, but I offered support. I was involved with the project that upgraded all the tools.

CA knows about the difficulties with eHealth when going through the upgrade process. I pushed myself to look at my company’s other options because across the board, we're looking for some new implementations. I've been looking for eHealth replacements from other vendors even though our company is CA-centric. As an engineer, I can't really narrow the scope so that we only look at what CA gives us because that's really not to the benefit of the company.

I know CA might not like this but I would suggest looking at other vendors in the market and really see what the completion has to offer. CA has got a large footprint and that's fine, but as an engineer, you should always be looking for what's best for the company regardless of the vendor.

Spectrum is the total alarm management utility. All event alarms are displayed in one place. We use it as a complete infrastructure management tool. All our third-party tools report into Spectrum. That's probably the most valuable part of this software that we use.

It consolidates all of the traps, alarms, and issues that arise from any device or network equipment, to a central location. This makes it really easy to find problems that arise, narrow down their source, and then escalate to the right people to fix them.

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. They can then prioritize and work on those issues that need to be worked first, allowing them to manage their time in terms of what they're working on.

Integration with third-party vendors could be improved by adding more trap solutions for third-party devices. These are now supported somewhat and I know that they're working on it, but people have a wide variety of different devices, servers, and equipment. It'd be nice to see all of that included into the software.

I think it still has room for improvement as far as the application, but support could also be improved. Third-party integration and other features have been requested over the years. I feel their support staff could work on these a little bit more, but as far as the application goes, I'd give it an 8/10.

So far I've had no issues with stability. I've used it for about two years. Like any other software, it has a few hiccups here and there, but for the most part, it runs really efficiently.

Companies from our size to larger organizations use Spectrum, so the scalability is there. I have never seen an issue with performance or the need to add more servers or scale to a larger environment. That hasn't been an issue.

The technical support is not bad, but I find that I generally resolve the issues before technical support can. Generally, I don't use their support too often. It's not about their support. The higher up you go in their support structure, I feel that they're very confident. But, I'm just a self-thinker and I'll figure the issue out before they do most of the time.

When I started, we were already using the solution and, as far as I know, it has been with us for 5-10 years. We've used it for quite some time.

When looking for a vendor, the application is most important. That's what stays with you the longest period of time. Again, you may not have to call support and you may not have to deal with sales very often, but the application is the one thing that you're constantly involved with.

I was involved in reconfiguring the environment. I guess you could call it an initial setup. Everything was pretty straightforward. It's easy to install and easy to setup. I haven't had any management issues or issues from configuration.

For what you're getting with the product, I don't think price is a downside. I don't know if it would be possible in the future to have a lite version, but something that smaller companies could work with as well would be a benefit to them. At current prices, for small businesses it's a downside. For bigger companies, I don't think it's too much of an issue, because otherwise they wouldn't use the product.

There weren't really other options. I've looked at other vendors. This is what my company went with, what we've used for a while, and we know it works. So, don't fix what's not broken, basically.

I would recommend the product to anyone looking for an infrastructure management application. I do know that for smaller companies the cost seems a little high, so it may not be for everyone. But, if you're looking for a total package that’s easy to get started and get it working, and something reliable and scalable, I would recommend the product.

Event Correlation and Topology features are by far CA Spectrum's strongest point. That means with its Topology, we can map out the architecture, and then with Event Suppression, if we lose an event upstream, all those downstream events that go through that path, they are suppressed.

We have removed all the duplicate tickets from our ticketing system. For example, if we have a store that is down, we get 20 tickets. Through CA Spectrum we are down to 1. So in the long term what we've done is less tickets, less people, more savings, etc.

With the latest release, the greatest benefit is the Checkpoint feature as we can now map and check for all the checkpoint connections. That's the biggest benefit to us.

Right now it's a Java-based application and we want everything moved to Web HTML5. The second big feature we want is log correlation. Currently, we can't do either of these features.

In my opinion, the stability is improving and getting better. Initially, we have had issues. Now, we are quite stable with the correct architecture.

It scales well. We have one of the largest implementations and it has done well.

The technical support is average. We've had better support from other companies and also worse support from other companies.

We didn't have any other solution before. We were using some supplemental products. We knew we were missing that managers tool. As we looked at other products, we decided to make sure we had the funding for this one.

We chose this product because of its scalability and also we had confidence in CA, which we didn't have in any of the other vendors.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor were scalability, stability and support.

I was part of the initial setup. We leveraged CA Professional Services to help. It is complex in a way that we have a large infrastructure and we wanted to map it out correctly from the start. If not, then you're going to have problems in the future.

We looked at other vendors, namely, EMC, SevOne, Riverbed, and HP.

I would advise others to design the correct architecture up front and that shall save you time in the future.

The logs are difficult to set up and we would like it in the HTML5 since Java is a very buggy product.

The ability to receive and correlate alarms and determine impacts when outages occur.

As a user of it, it's been fantastic just because it does so many things all in one configuration section. The alarms monitoring of the correlation of events is valuable. It’s been a great experience.

I would like to see easier use in some things, such as trying to configure certain correlations I've been working on. It's been a little bit of a hassle, because I'm not super familiar with their products and the best way to go about things.

Stability has been great once you get it up and running. I've had issues getting new installs to work, but once it's finally going and all set up to go, it's been fantastic.

I was involved in a couple of installations. It was very straightforward. It was just a matter of installing the package, doing the extraction, running it, and it seemed to work.

In terms of choosing a network management applicationsvendor, look for stability and ease of use. I've seen that with the other applications. We have issues happening all the time, although I haven't seen it with CA. I would suggest getting your hands on a product in a lab and play around with it.

The most valuable feature is it’s ability to monitor our network. We have a fairly sizable network with over 4000 nodes. Ultimately, at a hospital, network integrity is a patient care issue, so you want to make sure that the network is up as close to 100% as possible, 24/7 365. Hospitals don't close, so it needs to support that.

Its ability to alert us on network issues before they become critical is a great benefit. For example, say one of the power supplies on a device that has more than one goes down. Spectrum alerts us so we're aware of it, we can go and take care of the issue. If there are temperature issues, like if closets are hot, or something happens in the data closet, we are forewarned that there could be an issue happening. We can go and address it before anything happens.

The latest release I think is 10.2, and that may still be in beta right now, but we're on the newest version of the software. I don't necessarily know if there's anything in the latest release that has helped us, because we've been using Spectrum for about 5 years now. All the new releases do have their own advantages. I just don't know if we're leveraging any of those in relation to the latest release.

The web-based client that Spectrum has needs to be able to use multiple landscapes and multiple alarm filters. Right now, if you choose a landscape and then choose an alarm filter, you can have one or the other, but you can't pair them, which is a major problem because we have more than one landscape. That's one example.

Another example would be to have the ability to leverage Spectrum into Performance Center regarding topology maps. In Performance Center, we cannot see a topology map with drawn out nodes or take a picture from Spectrum and put it into Performance Center to see the nodes and links between the nodes. That would be something that we would like to see. At a recent conference, we spoke to CA about that; you never know. I hear the latest version fixes this, but I have yet to see it. If they can give me that in the web-based client, I would give Spectrum a 10/10. Then my team would be able to use it. Right now, with Java OneClick, it's a problem, because people would like to be able to launch it.

I would also really like to see a mobile Spectrum app. I know they have one, but it's really not very good. I don't know how much money and time they put into building it, but that would be great. If they had mobile, I have on my phone what they have. But it's really not very good. Again, if I could get the same view from my phone that I get from OneClick that would be awesome.

Spectrum itself is stable. I think some of the other applications like the reporting solution tends to be a little bit of a problem for a manager. Whenever we apply patches and upgrades, it basically breaks reporting and we have to rebuild our reports. I have a whole bunch of automated reports that go out, and every time there's some type of an upgrade we have to rebuild those supports from scratch.

Spectrum is very scalable. We presently have three landscapes and a number of alarm filters running on Spectrum. We are probably a mid-range sized customer. There are some customers that have 50,000 nodes on the network.

We have an MSO with CA, so they're constantly engaged with us all the time. They do a very good job. They support us with requirements that we are not really geared for and can't really support, so we'll ask them, "Hey, can you do this for us, and get this result?" We have that across all of the CA applications that we use.

I was not involved with the original setup at this particular company. I was involved with the initial setup at a prior company I was at.

When I started at the hospital, they already had it. I've been involved in building the Spectrum and Performance Center from the beginning, because when I started there they weren't really leveraging it at all.

It's been somewhat complex. More complex than I think it should have been, but I think that was more due to the original implementation being done by a third party. It wasn't done by CA and I think that was a problem. I think there was a lot of disconnect between what was actually being done and what was said was being done, and it wasn't very transparent, because the people that were overseeing it didn't really understand it. They were given a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors.

I would say that Spectrum is a great network monitoring tool, and it has a lot of features that most people probably don't even use. They just use it kind of like an up-down tool, but there's a lot more to it than that. I would say, if it was something that they were thinking about implementing into their environment, they should get somebody that knows the product well to explain everything and make sure that it's implemented correctly the first time.

As a bank, we use CA Spectrum to manage about 400 ATMs and 300 self-service terminals. We monitor this equipment network for alarms and other events. With Spectrum, we can determine how well the equipment is working and what services are available. Many of the issues are related to printing or paper supply.

Spectrum has given us the agility to solve problems faster. We are able to search our infrastructure so that we can isolate the problem and solve it fast. The first thing customers see when they enter the bank lobby is the ATM, so it's important that they be working properly.

The greatest benefit from the most recent release has come from redesigned dashboards. They make it easier for our technicians to discover faults and configure alarms that describe the problem in a clear manner. This allows us to go deeper into the zone or the equipment and isolate the problem. That is a real benefit for us.

I would like to see Spectrum dashboards more oriented in users necessities with an UX point of view. Also, I would like to see a more proactive approach to help managers to predict issues. Today with Spectrum we work in a reactive way where we notice problems after they occur. I would like Spectrum allowing us to prevent problems before they affect our Infrastructure.

We have been using Spectrum for six years.

At first, Spectrum was really difficult to configure properly. Today we are in a mature stage and the stability is really good. I think that the last version was more stable.

Spectrum is able to scale really well. Whenever we add equipment, such as when we open new branches or we replace old equipment with newer technology, we have no problem with scalability.

We work with a CA parner in Argentina called Netnix that helps us with first level support. They help us with the application on a day-to-day basis.

For many years, we used Navios to monitoring our infrastructure. Then, when we started to work with Spectrum, we had some cultural difficulties trying to get used to a new tool and getting the technical people to use it. For a while, we were running Spectrum and Navios at the same time. Today, we only use Spectrum with the ATMs and self-service terminals. There is also a cultural transformation in relation to the digital transformation, so we are working on moving to UIM.

I was not involved in the initial setup. Six years ago, when we first implemented Spectrum, I was in another role. Now, I'm responsible for the IT budget.

Mainly, we work with IBM and CA. They are our two main vendors. The most important criteria in selecting a vendor is the level of integration between the different tools. We work with several CA tools, such as SOI, UIM and APM to give us a total view of our infrastructure.

I think that the applications are great. The most important factor is who is going to be the partner helping you to implement this solution. Choose a good, trustworthy partner. I think that CA Spectrum is a really good tool.

What I like about the latest that they came out with is that 10.2 looks like it's going to be better, and they added a web console. I like the HTML5 fact of it, because it's a lot easier for me to get to my admins and other elements like that so they can look at their own stuff without having to sift through a bunch of stuff. I really like the web console addition, and from what I see from the 10.2, the whole thing is going to be HTML5. I really think that that's going to be real beneficial as far as me getting people convinced to use it and to actually look at it, instead of coming to me all the time for help.

It helped, basically, because we are working on root cause analysis. If we were to have outages, we really didn't know what the problem was, we just knew we had a server down. With Spectrum, we can do a root cause analysis by building topologies and we can actually tell you what port went bad on what device. Instead of just knowing that the device went down, we can know why it went down and exactly what happened.

If 10.2 goes completely to HTML5, I think that's going to be awesome. Just give everybody a website and tell them to log in and it'll be single-sign-on login, too, so they don't even have to remember another password. There is value in that alone, just trying to get people to log in and use it themselves, see it, and monitor it. They can monitor their own stuff and if something is wrong, I can do the tweaking, but at least they could see what's going on. I don't have to sit there and look at a dashboard and call everybody up and say, "Hey, your server's got an alert" because they don't want to mess with the Java console. They don't want to install whatever they have to, in order to do it themselves. I don't know, I call it laziness, but they're busy too. If it could fix it itself, that would be great! I think the way they're headed now with the roadmap and the visions that I saw. I really think that any improvements that they're going to make will be made in this next release. Basically, what I'm seeing right now, I think the improvements are happening..

We haven't really had any stability issues with it, now that they've actually did some more upgrades. The biggest problem we had with it at the beginning was just the Java console. You had to have an older version of Java and then you had to go in and actually set the library up in the Java for another one. You had to make a lot of changes and a lot of people didn't want to go through that. That is the reason why I really like the web console on it now because you can get away with not having to install the Java console. If you have to add three more steps to a process, they just don't want to use it.

I have used technical support and they are very good. I've never had a problem. Usually I'll open up a case and I'll hear something back from them the same day. They're very knowledgeable with their products and very helpful, too. If I just don't have time to research something and I need it fixed, I just tell them "I need this fixed" and I never have an issue. They take care of it. They'll even connect remotely and do it themselves sometimes.

Be patient. In its current state, I would have a representative from whoever your partner is help you with it. From what I can see, when we implemented UI, it took 2 weeks of on-site representation from our partner to help get it up and running. I think it's something that it would be less painful if you did have somebody that knew what they were doing, one of your partners or something, come and help you install it and get it installed. Then after that, start running with it. Do not do it by yourself.

I choose a vendor based on their knowledge of the product. I need them to be able to tell me what I need to know and where I can go to get information. Don't try to sell me something and then tell me you don't know how to use it. I've had that happen with some stuff. For example, by saying something like, "I'm new at this". I need the knowledge. That's what I want from you to help me to succeed, because we pay good money for this stuff. We have MSOs and everything we pay for yearly, and I really do use it. I don't have time to sit there and always research something and read something, so if I call you with an issue, I really hope you know what I'm talking about and you can help me fix it.

The most valuable feature is that after setup, using it is very straightforward. Configuration was very simple, and the technical support was also good.

The greatest benefit is the kind of alerts that we get. We can do root cause analysis to correlate events. Instead of getting 100 emails when the core is down we get an alert.

I would say integration between performance monitoring and CA Spectrum, as well as improved graphing capabilities.

We have not had any issues with stability.

I think the scalability is good. Right now, we have about 1,000 devices. The good part about Spectrum is that you don't have to worry when you want to expand.

Technical support is very good.

Previously, we were using open-source solutions.

With the help of the support and the documentation, setup was straightforward.

We also evaluated SolarWinds before going with CA Spectrum.

Stability and support are important to us. We want to have the confidence that the vendor is investing in their product.

Some of the most valuable features are:

• The ability to have a topographical map of our infrastructure
• Downstream suppression
• The ability to capture SNMP traps from non-network devices

It allows us to resolve issues faster when they occur in our environment. We're able to easily detect and alert when something goes down almost right away. We can be more proactive, and we're trying to reduce the number of incidents that our users experience. The graphical user interface has improved, so it makes it easier for our technical team to use it. It is a little easier than Spectrum was five years ago.

I would like to see a better, more simple web interface. Getting rid of the Java requirements would be awesome. We have a lot of different applications that use Java. Sometimes there are conflicts. For example, we have some web based applications that are proprietary to our company, which use a different version of Java than Spectrum, and this creates a conflict.

The Java requirement to run the console causes issues in some cases. It is possible to update the JAVA_HOME path, but requires knowledge of client operating systems. Having an HTML interface which does not require Java would be ideal.

Out of all of the CA products that we use, I would say this is the most stable. We very rarely have issues with it, which is great because it is monitoring almost 10,000 devices for us.

We've had no issues with any sort of scalability. We grow through mergers and acquisitions, so the ability to just roll out another server and have fault tolerant servers is great.

My team uses technical support and it's been great for this product.

We were using SolarWinds previously and it just did not offer a lot of the features that CA Spectrum does. CA worked really hard to create a strategic partnership with us which is very important. Being a large company, we have a wide range of products that we use from various different vendors and we need that support. We chose CA over IBM, and also SolarWinds. So again, the scalability of the product, the ease of implementation, and the account team was way easier to work with than any of the other vendors.

Spectrum installation was pretty straightforward. We had our primary servers acting as our fault tolerant servers. We were able to import a lot of our information from our old tool, which made it a lot easier to get up and running quickly.

Take into account more than just features. Look at the way that the organization provides support, the way the vendor provides support, and also if they're willing to work with you for the long term on adaptation within your company.