DX Spectrum Reviews

We use it to monitor the fault of our network to make sure that the infrastructure that delivers our services to our end users is up and all the redundancy is up. 

It performs really well in these tasks. It is one of its core competencies.

Spectrum is heavily loaded with alarm configuration, so it can detect whenever things go wrong. Things that I didn't even know could go wrong on my network. It picks up on those. I have integrated it into my ITIL management, incident management, change management, and problem management systems, so it feeds right in to my existing processes.

Spectrum is really good at discovering what I have out there just by giving it the list of things: my inventory. I feed in my inventory, and it discovers what is out there and how they are all connected to each other. 

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. Also, Java has an old look and feel, and it is slow-performing, as far as the client application is concerned. That is the reason why a lot of applications have gone web-based. 

What I would like to see out of the next version of Spectrum is a web-based GUI that is completely incorporated into what we call the "Performance Center", which is an existing system that is kind of a manager of managers, a Mom, if you will. That manager of managers would be the perfect place. 

It is a CA product. It is a mature product, but it does have issues. It does have issues that any product will have, but the nice thing is that CA does a pretty good job of addressing those issues.

It is really scalable. When we were first installing it, it would have required nine servers on-premise, which was a pretty big ask for us. Then, right towards the end of our prep for deployment, they released a new version that simplified it down to one. This was incredibly useful for us because that meant that we could really scale it up and really bring a lot of the stuff together that was on separate systems before.

We have used support. The only real downside we have seen with the support is sometimes it will take a while for them to get back to us. Most of the time when we run into a problem, it is a complex problem that Level 1 just can't fix. Because if Level one could have fixed it, we probably could have fixed it ourselves. 

We sometimes run into a situation where they are having to escalate back to somebody else who is on vacation who has had somebody else come in for him. There is slowness there, but other than that, they have been able to eventually address our issues. 

We have had one support issue that has been open for a couple of months, and it is currently open. It is a pretty tricky issue. It is incredibly difficult to replicate, which is the main reason that it is taking so long for them to fix it, because they can't really just go in, do what we do, and have it show up. When they do what we do, it does not show up, until randomly it does show up. 

I have been in a support organization before, and I know how hard it can be to troubleshoot random issues.

We did not have a previous solution. I came onto the scene to help clean up and modernize a lot of our operations. This was one of the things we looked at.

As one of my operation managers put it, we were driving down the road at 80 miles an hour with the windscreen painted black. Sometimes, we would roll down the windows and stick our head out the window, but we recognized it as a big gap. It was something that we needed: good fault monitoring. 

The initial setup was complex. We have an operations team who was responsible for doing it. They spent a lot of time working with CA on a couple of different issues that were not as straightforward. Mainly because our environment is significantly different than the typical environment that CA would have expected. 

It is the same problem that you run into with anybody who sells software. They think users use software a certain way, but then users do not use it that way. Or, you think the user's environment is going to be a certain way, so you build things it that depend on it being that way, but when it gets into the real world, you find out, "Oh well, you don't have it that way? Why don't you have it that way? Oh, I never even considered that you would have a reason for not doing it that way." So, those are the kind of things that we run into, because we are a company that does not do things your typical way.

We looked at a lot of different options and Spectrum was the one that met all of our criteria. Scalable and expansive enough to capture everything that we needed to capture, and even things that we did not even know we needed to capture.

We were looking at some of the other giant, old-blood software companies. The main reason we chose Spectrum over any other solution was mainly because it was mature, but it was also going places. We could see the future of where Spectrum was trying to go. We could see where it was going to be and where we needed it to be in two years when we get there in two years. 

Wayne Gretzky said, "I skate to where the hockey puck is going to be." We saw that Spectrum was headed to where the hockey puck was going to be. That means that when we adopted it, it was not where the hockey puck was. We understood that when we were getting it that we would deal with those pains up front, then eventually, we would be ahead of the game.

Every once in a while, you will run into somebody who will surprise you by being innovative or by showing you that they have a vision for something, and that they are working or striving towards acting like a startup within this big monolithic steam train that is CA.

I would look at the capabilities that Spectrum has to integrate with other solutions and be part of a bigger solution. When you are doing something like this, you have to have a bigger vision of what you are going to have across the board, then understand that this plays part of that, and it fills an important role.

It is better than your average bear. It is a good tool. It is a very robust tool. It has a lot of capabilities. I can't give it a 10 just because there are times when I will be working with the tool, and I will run across something that I do not like, some kind of feature that doesn't work the way I expect it to work, and it is not intuitive, and I will talk to CA about it, and they will say something like, "Well, nobody has ever tried to think about it that way," or, "Nobody's ever asked us that question." I'm like, "This thing is 20 years old. How has nobody ever asked that question?" 

More than likely, what I tend to believe is that they were not listening when somebody asked that question, which is actually something that has changed recently. I think Mike Gregoire has done a good job of changing the attitude of a lot of the stuff, and they have got some new leadership that has really made it so that they are now listening. Whenever I bring up something like this, they say, "Yeah, we know. You've brought this up before. This other guy has brought that same thing up. We understand it." It does not help solve the problem. There are pieces of the software that are still not intuitive. However, the fact that they are listening makes a difference.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We do not actually select vendors. We select products. Really, I could care less whether or not the product comes from CA because we have other stuff with CA. In fact, we tend to frown on picking a product just because it comes from a vendor that we are already doing business with. It makes it so that we are not very agile. We have to really consider the solution very objectively. We only consider the vendor when it comes to their history of being able to perform, their history of being able to support and provide top-notch solutions. We frown on coupling the purchase of one tool, or the acquisition of a tool, just because we own another tool by that same vendor. So, we do not really select vendors.

The product helps to correlate events. 

The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.

DX Spectrum needs better documentation on its complex features. 

I have been using the product since 2005. 

I rate DX Spectrum's stability an eight point five out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a nine out of ten. 

The tool's setup is simple. 

We have seen ROI since it saves time and money. 

DX Spectrum's pricing depends on the license number. It is affordable. 

DX Spectrum adapts to emerging technologies. It is an all-inclusive suite that includes performance. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

It helps our NetOps group actually handle alarms in a way that lets them see the bigger picture of those alarms, and how they might affect our services. It helps us communicate information about the network state better to services that might be impacted by a specific network condition.

Spectrum allows us to have a holistic view of our network architecture. We have a pretty heterogeneous topology at U of M, we're a half Cisco, half Juniper shop, and we have multiple layers to our network topology. So, it's really important for us to be able to do that topological map, and be able to visualize the network state at any given time.

Spectrum is interesting because it's a super-mature product for CA, and it works really, really well the way it is. In terms of new features and functionality, I feel like there has to be a transition there. The Spectrum OneClick is a Java-based client, and that's aging. Really, before any new feature integration, I'd love to see a comprehensive rebuild of the UI.

It's pretty stable for us. We have, not a highly available implementation of Spectrum, but we have an active standby situation, where we have an active SpectroSERVER and a standby SpectroSERVER and an active OneClick and a standby OneClick running all the time. So it works out pretty well that way.

As the kind of enterprise that straddles the line between telco size and enterprise size, it scales for us, because we're not all the way at telco yet. Maybe one day.

Pretty good. They're super responsive. They have that four-tier system and that works pretty well, because if we have a question, we can ask it at a lower priority and it will still get answered. If we have something where our hair is on fire, they'll call us right away.

It could be a little bit better, to be honest. The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated, I think.

When selecting a vendor, the most important consideration is product; it has to be product and features.

I'd give it an eight out of 10 right now, because it does what we need it to do. It could go an extra 20 percent somewhere.

I use the solution for monitoring and configuration management. 

The tool is very mature, and its valuable features are monitoring and configuration management. 

From a functionality perspective, the product is not doing what it should. Also, there are some concerns about the accessibility. I would appreciate additional out-of-the-box troubleshooting scripts, like templates for addressing various issues. Currently, when troubleshooting online, I need to create my scripts. It would be beneficial if the platform could provide pre-built scripts or templates to help automate certain troubleshooting tasks.

I have been using the product for eight years. 

I rate DX Spectrum's stability a ten out of ten. 

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten. I can scale it for hundreds and thousands of users easily. 

DX Spectrum's technical support is good and responsive. 

I have used OpenText before DX Spectrum. 

I can complete DX Spectrum's deployment in two hours. 

DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap. 

I have my own script to analyze the data and perform actions in the backend, like repairing a configuration. I rate DX Spectrum a nine out of ten. 

• Network Configuration Manager
• MPLS & VPN Manager
• Southbound Gateway
• Event Rules
• Event Procedures

By using event rules and procedures, we got an improved event management process. CA Spectrum is very useful for event handling and brings us a robust “manager of managers” console.

SpectroSERVER fault tolerance (FT) functionality: The OneClick console should have a native HA or FT functionality. Actually, the only way to get this is by using a load balancer.

SpectroSERVER is the core component in CA Spectrum architecture which polls devices into the network. You can use multiple servers to build some kind of "cluster" to provide continued device polling when some server fails. A OneClick console (web server) is front-end of CA Spectrum, and it does not have an option to provide continued user access when a OneClick server fails (High Availability). You can use a Load Balancer, but is very expensive.

We have been using this solution for seven years.

SpectroSERVER and reporting databases can grow quickly. If you don't take care of trap storms, this can cause SpectroSERVER crashes and performance issues in the reporting.

No scalability issues were encountered.

Customer service is very good. I would give them a rating of 10 out of 10.

The North America technical support team is excellent, 10 out of 10.

The LATAM support team has some things to improve, six out of 10.

The initial setup was complex because it requires a deep knowledge about tool architecture and proprietary software. In some cases, if you make a mistake during the installation or the initial setup, the better solution is to reinstall or reinitialize some DB.

We implemented the solution through a vendor team. Their level of expertise was high, nine out of 10.

Licensing is usually expensive, but cost efficient.

We evaluated IBM Tivoli Monitoring.

I recommend the use of CA Spectrum mainly to monitor network infrastructure. Use this tool like a “manager of managers”. Event monitoring is a very powerful functionality.

If you want to monitor servers, apps, and databases, then use CA UIM probes.

For me, as a deployment person and support person for the product, the most valuable feature is the scalability of the product. We started out with a fairly ambitious goal of managing about ten thousand devices. That over a couple of years became about one hundred thousand devices. Without completely crashing our original architecture, we were able to scale up to meet that requirement rather easily by just horizontally adding more servers.

It met a really critical need inside of my company because just before I was hired, they had about a two-day outage in one of their data centers. They didn't really understand the scope of the outage because they lacked in their existing monitoring environment the ability to see the topology of the network. They thought they were fixing the problem over here for a couple of days until they finally realized, oops, they probably really made it worse. So that is one of the key things that Spectrum brings to the table, that ability to do vault isolation, and alarm suppression, and more quickly find and focus on the area that needs to be fixed.

A big problem for us now is the Java requirement for the console. It really should be using HTML5. Our personnel use a multitude of enterprise and network management tools, each of them with different Java requirements. They, as cleverly as they can, have devised a means of trying to make those things sort of work and play nicely together on their glass. But it's an issue. Every time we do an upgrade, the Java version changes for Spectrum.

The new web client is a fairly basic sort of operator-level solution at this point, but it's going to expand into a full-blown one at some point. One of the questions that I'll have for product manager is, what's the timeline for replacing Java?

From time to time we have issues with Spectrum. When we do, they are generally easy to recover from. I am very impressed with the stability of this product. I've been doing network management tools a long time and I know of what I speak.

In Spectrum, the concept is really two tiered. It's a solution with a web client application. Initially, we had nine servers doing the polling and, I think, two one-click servers serving the buoy. Then management came to us and said we need to do a whole other part of the enterprise, so add another nine servers. We just quickly added them and pointed them to the devices and the main location server, which is the one that ties all of the polars together. As more users were added, we just added more one-click servers.

I think we are one of the larger Spectrum deployments in the western hemisphere. There are some things we would like to request for product enhancements in terms of supporting a horizontally-scaled set of one-click servers.

I was very excited to see the presentation yesterday that told us where they think the product is, where it's going, and we are going to hear more of that today with the roadmap presentation. Things are looking very good.

It has been very, very good. We sometimes have to more carefully explain our problem to the person that is assigned to us. But once we get that fully understood, we quickly get the right focus. I have been very impressed a number of times with the quality of the person on the other end of the phone. They've actually helped us with some things beyond the actual current problem when they've taken a look at our system and said, oh by the way, do this or do that. It has been very good.

Installations went smoothly. Customizations were pretty straightforward.

If you like to sleep at night and not be disturbed on the weekends, get Spectrum. It's a really robust, mature product, but still with newer and newer features being added, and it's very, very stable.

It was software-based deployment, and we were monitoring the internal network and client devices of an enterprise MSP. We were also using it for generating alerts for ticketing.

We were able to monitor their entire network infrastructure and receive valuable alerting in a timely fashion so that we could react to any instances when there were down devices.

The containerization of different objects was very helpful in building an org structure. Being able to separately manage your MSP clients with separate visibility was also helpful.

Scalability is a highly rated feature of this solution. It is better than some of the other tools that I've used in terms of scalability. We scaled it to tens of thousands of devices.

The granular access control that it provided so that you could only see devices that were related to what you were working on was great. I couldn't see the entire inventory of devices. I could only see the ones that were related to my work. It has got a very granular access control component.

For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts.

Its visualization can be improved. It doesn't have a very advanced GUI. It is very basic and simple, but it does work.

I used this solution for two and a half years. I have used it within the last 12 months.

It was quite stable. We had very few outages during the time I used it.

From the scalability perspective, it was fantastic. We were able to monitor our entire infrastructure at the telco level. We were also able to monitor all of the network tools and devices within our client containers. It was a very scalable product. Overall, 3,000 to 4,000 users were using it, and we probably had tens of thousands of devices.

I did not use their technical support. We didn't get an opportunity to do that.

I was not involved in its deployment. It was done well prior to my being part of the team that was using it. 

In terms of maintenance, it requires just the standard software updates and patching. It doesn't require anything out of the ordinary. You just have to deal with more of the ordinary patching cycles. I didn't actually have any experience updating the entire system itself. That was outside of my scope of work. Because we were deploying it at a telco level, we had several teams working on it. My role was adding and removing devices and updating devices for the customers I was supporting. We would add and remove devices in the client networks and the client containers based on the additions and removal of the hardware in the system.

We've been using this solution for probably the last eight to ten years through ongoing upgrades and updates. If there wasn't a return on investment by using the platform, our organization would have gone for a different solution. We're very cost-conscious, so we were able to get the value that we were looking for out of it.

I would advise others to be prepared to do some fine-tuning and scripting to support the product. With any tool of this nature, there are going to be some customizations to monitor certain devices. You should also make sure that you get your containers organized correctly. If you organize the containers correctly with different groups assigned, it will make your life a lot easier to be able to organize your data. Have a solid structure for that and a good plan.

I would rate DX Spectrum an eight out of ten. It was a really solid platform. They did a really great job. The coordination of alerting was probably the biggest issue we had, just because of the scale of the network we were dealing with.

We use it as a fault-management tool for our networking devices.

It's performed very well. We're still somewhat in the infancy. We've got a new deployment of Spectrum so we aren't 100% fully deployed with it. We have it integrated with CA Performance Center, which is what our initial experience is with, and we're just now bringing CA Spectrum into the fold.

The quick notification of issues, quick alerting because timeliness is always valuable, it's very important for us.

Again, that's a little tough because we aren't using it to it's full potential right now. We're hoping for greater visibility into our network, not just for us but for our customers as well.

It's been very stable and very easy to work with.

In terms of scalability, we've managed to discover just about all of our devices. We're still working with configuring, so for what we're using it for, which is very bare bones right now, basically just up-down, it scales fine. As we add additional capability to it, that may change, but I haven't seen that yet.

Support has been very good. They've answered all the questions that we've had. 

We've had issues that were a "severity-one" so they hopped on it immediately. For issues that have not been as urgent, they've been very timely in their response as well.

We were using CA Performance Center, and CA Spectrum is a logical extension of CA Performance Center. Between our management and CA themselves putting on the full-court press for sales, we decided to go that route.

It was somewhat complex, but that's also a little difficult to evaluate because we had a consultant that was the primary resource for the setup, and he had some challenges. I think if we had had a different resource it might have been more straightforward.

We did consider two other vendors. We considered SolarWinds, and I can't remember the other company but that company didn't last very long. It was somewhat close between CA and SolarWinds, but we decided to go with CA.

In the vendor selection process what is important to us are

• reputation
• reliability. 

It also helps if you have a current relationship, and we have a long-standing relationship with CA. That made it rather easy for us.

I give it a nine out of 10 so far but I have to qualify this answer. It's done everything that we need it to do. Again, until we do a deeper dive and explore it to its fullest potential, that could change.

Whoever you have do your deployment and implementation, make sure they know what they're doing.