"The Spectrum tool improved our network assurance levels for our business units."
"The stability of the product is key. It never breaks, really. The stability and reliability of the Spectrum product have been top-notch."
"The monitoring just comes to us: "Oh, there's something wrong with that machine." It tells us. There are some 50,000 machines or so, all doing different things. And if they go down we hear about it."
"Spectrum is very useful for us, because the product lets us monitor and control all the various components of our infrastructure that support our business from an IT perspective."
"The quick notification of issues, quick alerting because timeliness is always valuable, it's very important for us."
"It is easy to understand and determine when and/or where the network is failing."
"Scalable and stable network monitoring tool with a simple setup."
"Stability has been good. We really have not had any issues."
"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."
"Probe packages and probe deployment."
"The ability to monitor any platform. We have Windows, Linux, AIX, and mainframe all being monitored with the same UIM infrastructure."
"I can use the Drag and Drop feature to build dashboards within minutes."
"The number of probes available. Out of the box, I believe about 200 probes are available. And, if there's a probe that is not available, you can write one. You can also go to the communities and suggest, and based on demand, CA will write one for you."
"One of the things that I like about DX Infrastructure is that the topology is good enough to see what is happening in the infrastructure. You also get alerts if something is happening in the network. There are many features and benefits. It is serving our customers in knowing exactly how their network is performing in terms of reliability. It also helps them in planning the capacity. They know how much bandwidth the branches are consuming."
"Great customized dashboards and drill down reports with auto serve analytics."
"This solution allows us to have an overview of the infrastructure and identify areas where the performance isn't optimal, or where upgrades could be carried out."
"It is customer-centric. Customers can access the event list from their location or desktop and view the event. There is no need to go and connect to any other server and run events to have a view of all the events happening in the environment. We get a good response from customers about this feature and the main architecture of NetCool. Its processing is very good. Deduplication and correlation functionalities are good in this solution as compared to other solutions. A big advantage of NetCool is that it also supports multi-layered protocols. We can receive multiple events from different protocols like UDP, HTTP, and those events can be captured in NetCool."
"It is an easy-to-use solution."
"The monitoring is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the event management capability."
"The biggest plus points for me are the configurability and scalability of the solution, as well as the multi-tenancy of the platform."
"Probes are the best feature because they are well written which rarely requires you to write additional rules. These probes monitor activity within your environment."
"DX Spectrum needs better documentation on its complex features."
"OS monitoring needs to be better developed, as well as their services, e.g., cluster monitoring, URLs, etc."
"It takes some time to learn how to use this solution."
"A better integration with the UIM, as far as being able to do root cause analysis and that type of analytics."
"I would recommend AI capability built-in so it becomes more predictable and we jump ahead of the curve. This is the one really important feature I would really like to see in any product that provides alarms."
"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."
"There's a little bit of complexity to the initial install because you're dealing with operating systems. You have to make sure all the prerequisites are done, anti-virus exceptions, etc. Then there's the bringing it up and then there's discovery of the network and setting that up. It takes time."
"The solution's stability needs improvement."
"They need to continue to advance the filter capabilities, and provide more input fields."
"We had to do some work to make what was more of a business class solution work at an enterprise level."
"The dashboards need to be improved."
"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 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."
"We would like the navigation of this solution to be more user friendly for our system administrators."
"The biggest feature that I've been hoping they would enhance on is inventory management: things like adding/removing nodes."
"CA UIM needs some improvement with performance reporting (if we compare it to CA eHealth)."
"I would like for the next release to be more user-friendly and out of date. The next release should focus on the cloud, AI, and ML technologies."
"The cost of the product is quite high. They should work to adjust their pricing models."
"Its technical support team takes longer to reply."
"The web portal and typical event controls are a little outdated."
"There should be an easier-to-understand model, more of a flat-structured model rather than different tiers of licenses which complicates licensing."
"Its integration could be better. They should provide an easier integration for all the monitoring stuff, and it will make things easier for us. Currently, there is a complexity in integrating it with a vendor application, and we have to use another tool to integrate it with a vendor application. To integrate some applications with NetCool, I need to install an IBM tool on top of it. It would be good if they can provide an API or any kind of interface that we can leverage while developing a new protocol interface or application. We should be able to use an API or interface with NetCool. Its GUI can also be better. As compared to other tools, it is not user friendly, and it is not easy to do stuff through GUI. Whenever we do anything on the GUI, it takes time. They need to focus on the GUI part, especially the dashboard. They should focus on how users can effectively drill down from one box to another. The visual appeal of the dashboard is as important as the data and functionality."
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