DX Spectrum Room for Improvement

CL
InfoVista Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

One thing I would like to see improved is that it doesn't really allow for multi-tenancy. If you're an ISP or an MSP and you want to use this tool to provide these types of fault management services to your customers, you would need a separate SpectroSERVER for each customer, and probably a separate OneClick Console. You would almost need a separate instance of the tool running for each customer. Whereas other tools have multi-tenancy built-in, out-of-the-box, and you can stand up one instance of the tool. They should definitely try to change that to make it multi-tenancy-friendly because it's not at all.

They could also improve how events are managed and correlated in the system. They need to make event management and correlation something that works from a group perspective, versus having to go into all these files and manipulate certain portions of a file to effectively manage events. That should be something that comes through in an interface.

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Umair (Abu Mohaymin) Akhlaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Solutions & Services Head at Duroob Technologies

It's not a great performance management tool. Its reporting capabilities are not very good at all. 

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UW
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Buyer's Guide
DX Performance Management vs. DX Spectrum
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about DX Performance Management vs. DX Spectrum and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
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NR
Solution Architect at Infosys

The GUI needs to be changed from Java to HTML5. This includes its integration with CA UIM, and the ability to dynamically move objects around.

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HR
CSI manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I think the management or configuration of devices needs some improvement. 

The ability to add new device families from different vendors also not easy. It's a bit difficult.

I would like to see some historical performance of our devices added to Spectrum. That would be great.

It's a live solution, not for historical performance.

Reporting is also an area that could be better. The reporting tool they are using is called Jasper and it requires an official license to be able to work well. It would be helpful to have reporting included directly with Spectrum.

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it_user558423 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at New York Presbyterian Hospital

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.

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it_user558627 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Operations Manager at a individual & family service with 10,001+ employees

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.

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SW
Senior NMS Architect at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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. 

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DickBaker - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Design Engineer DTCC at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

DX Spectrum needs better documentation on its complex features. 

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JS
Network Systems Integration Engineer at University of Michigan Health System

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.

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ZH
Director at Starways

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.

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RK
IT Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

This solution is missing the in-depth SDN correlation due to the late arrival of Spectrum VNA features and supported SDN networks. The various setups of the SDN networks are not always supported (yet) by the Spectrum VNA engine.

Integration with non-Broadcom AIOps solutions is a known area. We want to make our own choice for the AIOps solution and do not want to be forced to use the Broadcom OI solution by default.

For our size, a redundant based docker platform should be supported for large scale environments with more than 80,000 devices. This will have a very strong positive impact on the effort we need to spend in maintaining our large scale Spectrum solution and the related cost. The time to market for the new Spectrum solution will be reduced dramatically if this becomes available.

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LG
Big Data Architect en Seguros SURA at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user353325 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

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?

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RK
IT Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

They need a seamless integration to launch cloud-based management products of Broadcom.

In the future, more cloud-based solutions will be offered. It is necessary to strengthen the integration with other cloud-based products.

They also have other products that are Operational Intelligence, which is currently stand-alone and usually requires tighter integration. It should be simplified as well, as it is rather complex to create, and doesn't match the ideal situation. 

If the integration is simplified or improved, it will be a unique selling point in comparison to the competition on the market.

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it_user516528 - PeerSpot reviewer
OSS Manager at Telefónica UK / O2

CABI was a major issue for us, but the newly added Jaspersoft is a better-suited reporting toolset, so this has already been addressed.

The OneClick UI is a little dated, but still very functional. They are also addressing this with the new web client. It's not quite where it can be, but it shows promise and looks pretty good for their first attempt at it.

One thing I would like to see is that all the IM products look similar in terms of UI design/widgets, etc. We are an MSP and would like our customers to have a seamless experience and not be able to notice moving between the various Infrastructure Management products.

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GD
Lead Tower Monitoring at libero

It would be helpful to have a business layer and the possibility to integrate with information like the location and business structure. It's difficult to analyze and configure. It's not a very smart tool. It's a little old, and there are other tools that are more efficient.

From my point of view, the problem isn't the single tool itself because Spectrum and Zabbix are vertical tools for specific devices. So, Spectrum is vertical on a network. The problem is to have a correlation with the infrastructure layer, network layer, and business layer. In my experience, the client wants to see the business service.

The business service works fine, but when there is a problem on the business layer – for example, the web service or CRM process flow – it's difficult to correlate the business issues with infrastructure issues.

Now there are many APM monitoring tools. We have the artificial intelligence to correlate different alerts, aggregate alerts and give them to the client as a head-to-end picture. The problem with Spectrum is they still require effort to create the report to extract the configuration. This is a big limitation.

I would suggest improving the web GUI to improve the device monitor configuration and to improve or to integrate the new tool for reporting. For example, it can be helpful to integrate with a tool like Grafana or another dashboard to have a layer for the reporting.

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it_user643890 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Systems Management (ESM) Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

CA works continuously to upgrade this product, adding new abilities and fixing bugs. They do a very creditable job. The areas I am aware of that could use improvement are fairly minor; for example, the ability to sort lists in the Discovery Console. Things like that. CA provides a good customer feedback mechanism they have dubbed “the idea wall”. Suggestions for improvements, expansions, etc., can be posted there. These ideas are often incorporated into CA products.

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it_user558132 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Performance Analysis/Migration Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user558375 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Network Performance Engineer - Engineering Performance Services at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user37836 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director - Enterprise Technical Computing at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Reporting and network bandwidth monitoring features needs to be improved. When we generate the outage report, the alarm title does not appear correctly in the reports. Also, sometimes events are not synchronized and are missing from the reports.

Spectrum needs to include historical reports for network LAN/WAN performance utilization and bandwidth utilization.

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it_user558357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Of Staff at Aig

They are looking at other CA products and I'm sure they are happy with Spectrum. We were looking at AXA (CA App Experience Analytics) and some of the tools you can integrate it with. In our company, we have Spectrum and SOI (CA Service Operations Insight) that we integrate with other tools. So, maybe they can combine the features into one product which can help.

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KZ
Works at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We're trying to replace this solution with another product because it's too expensive and not very user-friendly; it requires training and takes some time to learn how to use it. 

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GP
Senior Network Analyst at a transportation company with 201-500 employees

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.

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it_user778554 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at Charter Communications, Inc.

Definitely the way this product needs to go is more web-based. They need to put more emphasis in the web technology. There is some there, and it is being developed, but it is not all the way there. There is a Java fat client that they have not moved all the support from the Java client into the web and that is what they need to do.  

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LG
Big Data Architect en Seguros SURA at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Like SpectroSERVER's 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 arquitecture that polls devices in to network, you can use multiple servers to build some kind of "cluster" to provide continued device polling when some server fail. Oneclick console ( web server) is front end of CA Spectrum it do not have an option to provide continued user access when a oneclick server fail ( High Availability). You can use a Load Balancer but is very expensive.

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FB
Senior IT Manager at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Reporting
  • Full web-based topology view
  • Path view
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Baris Isiklilar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at BTBilgi

The product should provide performance management features.

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it_user778896 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Manager at Delta Air Lines, Inc.

A lot of the filtering and orchestration of the background takes a lot of manual work. There are a lot of processes involved and it is hard to keep it up-to-date with a lot of moving parts. Making it more dynamic could be better. 

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it_user778638 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Of Monitoring Service Delivery at American International Group

The biggest issue is our integration right now between UIM and Spectrum is lacking. It does not allow us to pass all the details. There is a new integration, which has the new version of UIM. I hope it clears up everything.

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it_user572898 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Charter Communications, Inc.

There are certain attributes that we would like to be able to send northbound to different applications or different API calls that we can use. That is one area for improvement.

Also, I would like to see a unified poller, which they have already talked about. If I have Performance Center in Spectrum, I don't need to have separate servers for those same applications. I could have one unified poller, which is getting the traps and also polling information.

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it_user558144 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at Northwell health

I would like to see more integrations with other products.

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it_user778845 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

CA is going in the right direction. What we want is more integration between the tools and it looks like they are doing more of that. That is probably the big thing. Better integration between the tools, being able to take all the data from the tools and having it available in one place, such as generate dashboards, analytical data, etc. 

I would like to see CA move Spectrum, Performance Manager, and some of their other tools moved to a SaaS based model. You see a lot of other manufacturers which are moving toward SaaS based models.

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it_user558300 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Service Delivery Analyst at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

I am not sure I can address areas with room for improvement because right now, it is doing everything we need.

See my tech support comments below.

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it_user353238 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Development Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The OneClick MIB tools are a little complex, and I've seen other MIB tools that are a little simpler. I'm used to it, but I know if somebody's not familiar with it, it can be a little bit challenging. But overall, I have experience with it so I know what works and what doesn't work.

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Jorge Antun - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant in the Financial Sector in areas of Technology, Operations and Business Processes at Add Motions

The product is complicated to use.

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MT
System Administrator at a government with 10,001+ employees

The visual is good but it's a little archaic. I think it's the way it's compiled, because I've been struggling recently with deploying it in different departments. The software still uses a 32 bit library on the Linux boxes for installation. Every admin scratches their head when I ask them to install, 16 or 17 packages, 32 bit packages on a 64 bit architecture.

Also, they dumped all the documentation from the old versions and re-tagged them with the new version and they haven't updated them for a few years. That's a bit of a problem. They need to get rid of Java and 32 bit applications proctors, and that would be good.

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RH
Program Manager - Enterprise Command Center at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The configurations are still XML-based and require a good deal of coding to setup each object for monitoring.  Alerting is yet more coding, and relationships are more coding... In a drag-and-drop world, this tool is in need of a bit more than a make-over. 

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it_user558123 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Monitoring Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user378384 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect EMS Practice at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Reporting & network bandwidth monitoring features needs to be improved. When we generate the outage report, the alarm title does not appear correctly in the reports. Also, sometimes events are not synchronized and are missing from the reports.

Spectrum needs to include historical reports for network LAN/WAN performance utilization and bandwidth utilization.

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Purneswara Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at KyndleIT Consulting

DX Spectrum needs to incorporate faster support. 

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FL
Senior Solution Director, DevOps at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

One of the requests I've received from customers several times, which should be included in the next release of this tool, is the ability to export some of the topologies of DX Spectrum inside Microsoft Visio.

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Baris Isiklilar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at BTBilgi

DX Spectrum could be improved by them getting rid of the Java console. It would also be better with Turkish language support. 

As for additional features, they release changes quarterly. Right now, the only thing I would like is Turkish support. 

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FD
DevOps Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We have a huge environment and we have the event correlation set up. Event correlation only works per Spectrum server, for a huge environment more Spectrum servers are needed and the events are not correlated between the Spectrum servers. Broadcom has the intention to change this.

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it_user778524 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director IT at CNO Financial Group, Inc.

Once something goes down, that is when we get alerted versus we need more predictive analytics in place so we know a case based on patterns putting AI in place, or something along those lines, so we know that there is a pattern growing that the systems going to go down. Therefore, it becomes preventative versus reactive, so that is one area of improvement that I can suggest from a product perspective.

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. 

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it_user778590 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Tools Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The only pain point I have is some issues with support and the timeliness of getting a resolution. Other than that, we're very pleased with the functionality. They're coming out with Spectrum 10.3 and I'm sure it'll have some additional functionality. For our environment there's not a pain point from a functionality perspective.

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it_user558489 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate UEM Technologist at Sheetz inc

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..

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DM
Network Manager at SMA

This solution is too complicated to use for us, especially if you have many components. It's too big for us, which is one of the reasons that we will no longer be using it.

It’s Cloud be difficult to upgrade from one version to the next.

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it_user778884 - PeerSpot reviewer
Communication Systems Analyst at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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DZ
Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

It’s like having a Ferrari, without a professional driver. Most companies don’t use all the good features. The out-of-the-box features are just too poor: (Ping, CPU, Disk and Memory, Process, and File Systems). CA Spectrum is an infrastructure monitoring tool, that comes with a few easy to configure metrics, such as Ping, CPU, Disk & Memory, Process and File Systems. However, these metrics are really basic, actually we can do better with Nagios or any other open source tools in the market. In my experience, most big companies, that have CA Spectrum only use it for monitoring these basic metrics, i.e., where the real benefit is not there. If you only want it for this purpose, then there are better and cheaper options available.

It’s mostly for SNMP.

It doesn’t give you performance metrics: You need CA eHealth for this.

Some of the benefits of this solution (also mentioned above) are:

Event Configuration: It can easily (for an expert) create any business logic such as it can alert first, if you receive 2 events from Type A. If you already alert this kind of alarm and it happens again, then do it only, once every hour.

Event Correlation and Root Cause Analysis.

Service configuration (model a service).

Southbound Gateway integration – It can integrate with any other solution and dynamically, create models on CA Spectrum.

Alarms (impact, root cause, symptoms, etc.)

Watches – It can create custom metrics, besides the basic ones that I have mentioned before.

InfoView – It can create custom reports.

Topology view – This one is really difficult and time consuming, but awesome, if you can do it right.

Most companies spend money on the license, but they don’t have a good administrator, to make use of all the good features. So they end up with a really expensive tool, that does only the basic things, which any tool in the market could do probably better. But, the good features of CA Spectrum, only a few monitoring tools can actually do.

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it_user558009 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Engineer at Interval International

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.

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it_user510261 - PeerSpot reviewer
Services Consultant at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The EventDisp Logic (Code) is too complex.

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it_user496368 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Coordinator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We are not using the latest version of the tool yet, but as far as I know, I think an improving reporting of data would be a good idea. The report area is very poor and we cannot work properly with additional information and the custom reports. We just use the default report for information that we have inside the database for these reports.

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it_user354864 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tier 3 Technical Support Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

A lot of things are internal development, like we'll have a network alert and we've got it configured so that it can open a trouble ticket and service management system. You know, a lot of features like that are the ones that we can develop internally without necessarily having it added to the software release, but it would be nice to have it added nevertheless.

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it_user778746 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Monitoring Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Better integration with all the other products in the Agile suite of tools; anything they could do to make that less complex, would be great. They've made it less complex, it's getting better as time goes. It's just such a long road because different products were originally different companies that have been hooked together, acquired, and then assembled as their overall solution. And there's good and bad in that.

The good is they have all these capabilities in a one-stop shop. That's awesome. But, sometimes those were competing products that are now having to work together, and they have to come in and force them together. It adds to the complexity.

If nobody else has said documentation, 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.

Some of the products are better than others at documentation. Some are them are very good and some of them are not as good. It's a little disheartening when you go in to find whatever it is procedure you need to do and it's just not there. Or it's wrong. That's my favorite.

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BA
Programmer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see better scalability, and maybe, a more intuitive user interface. 

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Umair (Abu Mohaymin) Akhlaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Solutions & Services Head at Duroob Technologies

Its not performance management tool for Network Performance Management you need to have CA UIM or CA eHealth.

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it_user558537 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head IT Operations at ICBC Argentina

From the users perspective the looks and feel of dashboards of Spectrum would be easier to use and for understanding as APM will be in 10.5 version which we saw in CA World.

Also, from our point of view, It´s necessary that CA people in charge of Spectrum tool, work more in order to better integration between Spectrum, with APM, SOI and UIM.


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it_user558102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Allscripts

It is not so much in regards to the product itself. In my opinion, it's the documentation that I find is not up to the mark. Instead of reading 400 pages, if they could just give me one simple example, it would make things a lot easier because it's a very complex product that does a lot of complex things. I would like to have illustrations on how to do the simple things as opposed to sending me a link that refers to 400 pages of a manual; it doesn't help. Saying “select the criteria” is meaningless if I don’t have the basic knowledge of what the criteria means or why I’m selecting it.

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it_user558063 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user394989 - PeerSpot reviewer
TEM Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • NCM: Needs to be more user-friendly and refined. The ability to quickly see changes across various time configured backups helps to quickly identify changes which could be a root cause to a prevalent problem due to incorrect configurations.
  • MRTG graphs need to be more intuitive.
  • The GIS map feature needs to be enhanced and synced with topology views of containers and global collections.
  • The probable cause database needs to be enhanced.
  • As Cisco and Alcatel lose out to cheaper competition like Huawei, ZTE, etc., device certifications need to be updated.
View full review »
JE
Presales Consultant at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

The Systems Performance Agent is powerful, but, for example, if you want to run a sql query and set a threshold against the returned value, you can’t directly. You need a script with the threshold set in the script and an exit different than zero (0) to generate an alarm. This is something that almost every monitoring solution on the market has built-in. CA UIM, for instance, does that really well. What you have ready to use is the ability to execute the query and get the value for how much time it took to execute.

View full review »
it_user404031 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Network Operations Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

While deploying the tool, there were space and storage issues since the application loads for a long period each time there is an update.

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it_user351225 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle Engineer at a media company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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it_user558210 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I’d like to see better access to data elements via the API as well as better elements for the UIs. The UIs are somewhat inflexible and we'd like to see that improve.

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it_user558237 - PeerSpot reviewer
Capacity Planning at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I'd like to have more dynamic weather map capabilities and network mapping tools. I'd like to be able to scale some of the applications within Spectrum and I'd like to be able to add some functionality. But overall I'm happy with it.

View full review »
it_user215913 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • 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
View full review »
it_user191448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Code is very complex.

View full review »
it_user128562 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Support Analyst with 1,001-5,000 employees
There appears to be no intelligence within Spectrum itself, for example if we were to move a network device to a different switch port, it will see the neighbor as being available, but the link / switch port as down. Configuration of new events and alerts is overly complex. View full review »
CC
IT director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The solution's pricing could be better. Also, the customization of its web interface needs enhancement.

View full review »
KM
Senior Engineer - Networking at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

I have seen that there are some configuration issues with Huawei devices. Huawei devices are not properly supported, and there are incompatibility issues related to certain protocols.

The stability could be improved.

The rate at which our stability issues are resolved could be improved.

View full review »
it_user778827 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at Aerospace Corporation

HTML5. Right now, it is a very Java driven application. We have lots of issues. If we do have any issues with the front end side of it, it would be Java. Dealing with Java and all the changes that are constantly happening with Java.

View full review »
it_user197100 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Analyst / Technical Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I did not see the best level of usability.

View full review »
it_user392508 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer with 10,001+ employees

The documentation of this product is not very easy to understand without any screenshots or application windows.

It's also expensive for the company.

View full review »
it_user293970 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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

View full review »
OB
CTO at a aerospace/defense firm with 201-500 employees

The solution could improve by allowing the ability to monitor the network shortly after installing the software and adding an auto-discovery function.

View full review »
SO
Advanced Solutions - Sr. Strategy Advisor at GDT - General Datatech

It needs better integration with other CA products.

View full review »
FS
Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

There is room for improvement in the integration with other non-CA tools and databases. With some items that I scored, I have noticed that there have been significant changes in version 10, such as the WebClient.

We have some information collected by proprietary tools and some data stored in applications with our own development and we have difficulties in integrating/importing/exporting data to update and maintain the data.
Regarding the functionality of version 10, even though it is still in the stage of deployment and maturation, we realize the WebClient functionality already attends to much of the need following the occurrences without depending on the implementation of the Java client.

Another improvement I noticed in the new version was the greater capacity of absorbing devices in the same SpectroSERVER, facilitating the administration/maintenance of the tool and reports.

View full review »
it_user558534 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Planning And Control at ICBC Argentina

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.


View full review »
it_user492783 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Integrations with other CA products 
  • A better way to create reports
View full review »
EP
Senior Technical Consultant at The Instillery

I think the interface needs a bit of a revamp. They need to adapt it to the new app world that it is now ruling (iOS, Android Apps), and it needs to offer more. Also, the Sizing tool is a bit old, and the last time I used it the CPU recommendations for our SpectroSERVERs given by the tool were Pentium IV. I can see that now there is an online updated tool that can assist with your design which is good.

View full review »
it_user217680 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The ability to import new MIBs and manage new devices.

View full review »
AQ
Security Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Topology features need improvement, namely -

  • Weight of links
  • Less critical links
  • High critical links weighing
View full review »
KN
Techincal Support at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

IP conflicts cannot be resolved automatically in the case where an IP address changes. This is one of the capabilities that SolarWinds has.

There should be a facility to integrate with other monitoring applications that are currently running in the environment. For example, if a customer is already running SolarWinds then it would be helpful if integration between these two was easy to do.

View full review »
it_user218196 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a government with 11-50 employees

It's very difficult to use and customize. In order to maintain the software, we need specialized help. The usability is an issue for us.

View full review »
it_user201036 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

CA keeps on enhancing the product time to time, taking enhancements from users like us, as we make maximum use of their products.

I think they should improve or add advance performance reporting in the reporting part of Spectrum, they have recently replaced CABI with Jaspersoft in new version as a reporting integration.

View full review »
it_user140679 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
DR
Network Operations & Delivery Head for TSB Bank at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Integration with some other tools, and integration with some Network Packet Broker, need some improvement.

View full review »
it_user217803 - PeerSpot reviewer
Deputy Leader/Network management specialist of cNMS at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

ITIL -

  • Incident management
  • Automation
  • Connection between Spectrum and some standardized incident tools
View full review »
it_user874995 - PeerSpot reviewer
Support Engineer Management Area at Acuntia

Make it easier to certify devices. 

View full review »
it_user405477 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

There is still room for improvement for mobile clients like tablets and smartphones. Most of the functionality can only be used with the Java client.

View full review »
it_user779115 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technology Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

A better integration with the UIM, as far as being able to do root cause analysis and that type of analytics. 

They are separate products. There is some integration recently of the two, but not really at what I will say at the analytics level to tie the two, from one problem to the other. 

View full review »
it_user345651 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Simac Techniek NV

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.

View full review »
it_user205827 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It took a while to understand the product, but once we went hands on, it's great to work with. I have previously used Tivoli Enterprise console which doesn’t need any expertise and is easy to learn.

View full review »
it_user201033 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA Management Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
  • Network
  • Servers
View full review »
it_user83484 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Science at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's a mature product for a classic network.

New areas (NFV, SDN, APM) are covered by new technologies. As such, products should have tight integration with modern data science platforms.

View full review »
it_user234849 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Performance & Capacity Analyst with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
it_user676368 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure and Application Surveillance Specialist at a hospitality company with 201-500 employees

Interop between server/agent based monitoring (UIM).

View full review »
it_user558648 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees

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

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it_user415401 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Software Programmer III at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see improvement in the ability of the user to configure the maintenance mode more efficiently.

View full review »
it_user202551 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I really can't say there are any at this time. We are happy with the product.

View full review »
it_user202602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Really unsure of any, quite pleased with product.

View full review »
it_user198924 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

The tool fails to launch sometimes, and this was a frequent occurrence.

View full review »
it_user204822 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees

It's deployment tool is horrible.

View full review »
it_user564828 - PeerSpot reviewer
Telecommunications Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

There's always room for improvement! In order of importance, I would say that CA should start to get rid of Java on the OneClick console. They could highly improve the Configuration Management feature, the schedule manager and the watch's allowed types and formulas.

View full review »
it_user401589 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst Level 3 with 1,001-5,000 employees

There is a need for the separation of monitoring models as a log, Windows service, etc.

View full review »
it_user216501 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Mainly testing on CA's side!

View full review »
it_user890010 - PeerSpot reviewer
Coordenador de Suporte - Command Center at Agility Networks

OS monitoring needs to be better developed, as well as their services, e.g., cluster monitoring, URLs, etc.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
AppNeta by Broadcom vs. DX Spectrum
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about AppNeta by Broadcom vs. DX Spectrum and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
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