"The Global Collections are what I found to be most valuable. With the Global Collections, you're able to organize and categorize devices into "folders," or functional groups and categories, so that it doesn't matter which SpectroSERVER those devices are on."
"The most valuable feature is automatic discovery."
"It is easy to understand and determine when and/or where the network is failing."
"It has a high-quality graphical interface."
"Some of the most valuable features are it's highly scalable, the carrier is great, and if something has SNMP, it can monitor it. It's a great network fault management solution."
"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."
"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."
"It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one."
"It provides a comprehensive monitoring solution for our open systems."
"It gives an alarm when there's something going on, not just when there's an expected spike that happens every night on a server."
"It is easy to implement."
"It is easy to implement but requires good planning."
"Technical support is great."
"Great out-of-the-box capability."
"The real value is our being able to pull all the historic data that we need in order to gather every little metric and nuanced piece of information from a given device, a given piece of infrastructure, in order for us to generate alerts."
"It reduced cycles for a lot of quick out-of-the-box functionality. It also allowed us to get away from being stuck in SNMP, VTP V2, based off of agent deployment."
"It is easy to integrate with other models such as Oracle, other systems, external systems, and to reach events."
"The most valuable feature that comes with Netcool/Impact is the ISPF APA support. It is inherent to Netcool/Impact, so I can use the ISPF of any other product, which I can invoke and consume through Impact, and do integrations, which is great. I run the Netcool desktop application so I can integrate with other applications in the ticketing system. It's a great ability being able to invoke ISPF and integrate."
"The solution is great at being able to fetch almost any kind of file."
"This product allows us to make use of open-source products, including running Java code."
"The GIS map feature needs to be enhanced and synced with topology views of containers and global collections."
"If they could interact with the MIBs of vendors better, and have a lot more pre-loaded ones, that would be amazing for us right now."
"If nobody else has said the documentation needs improvement, let's go there. I understand, you can either write about it or you can do it. And most of us would rather they do it, but now that they've done it, those of us that didn't do it, we need to go and find: "Where did they write about this to tell us how to do it?" That's always lacking."
"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."
"Our consultant was four months on-site doing Spectrum setup and working through issues."
"We have had some issues with the spec server and the high availability replication of data. It fails over well, but it does not come back very well. We get duplicated events."
"DX Spectrum needs better documentation on its complex features."
"The visual is a little archaic."
"We have experienced challenges with finding a mechanism to deploy the agents, but it's only on the first deployment so it's not a big issue."
"They need to continue to advance the filter capabilities, and provide more input fields."
"It is a little complex to use versus other softwares."
"We would like to see automatic network topology."
"There is also room for improvement in the reporting. It is not really good enough, according to our customers. So what we now usually do is use Power BI to get them the kinds of reports they want."
"We want to see more investment in the UI and the dashboard."
"Within this product there are individual probes, and each of these probes doesn't always necessarily output the same kind of information into our database. So when we try to collect what's called QoS data, from one probe we might get a ton of information, lots of good stuff that we can use in our database, but then from another probe, we might not get so much or we might not be able to pull the things that we want to."
"I'd also like to see more probes. More probes in the sense that we were coming across devices that we're expected to monitor and manage for which, out of the box, there isn't a nice, clean solution. There are probes that are dedicated for certain devices and certain device types, which is great. But then there are times we come across nuanced products that we have to develop our own solution for. There are probes that exist in there that allow us to make a customized solution, but it takes a lot more time."
"IBM is not investing in the development of the on-premise version of this solution."
"The solution is somewhat complicated. It's not exactly straightforward."
"Stability-wise, this product needs to be improved."
"For improvement, I'd say the dashboard and the overall GUI could use some work. Although, I don't think that there's much improvement that Netcool really needs to achieve in this area, because when we're talking GUI, Impact is able to integrate with any third-party system and it comes with ISPF APA. It's more beneficial than Netcool/OMNIbus in this respect, and it's quite easy to handle."
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