We performed a comparison between DX Spectrum and Plixer Scrutinizer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Monitoring Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"I have found the cross analysis feature to be the most valuable."
"I can use it to detect whenever things go wrong on my network."
"It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one."
"The product’s stability and robustness are valuable."
"It has a high-quality graphical interface."
"The stability of the product is key. It never breaks, really. The stability and reliability of the Spectrum product have been top-notch."
"Spectrum does such a great job of discovering our network that we have a high confidence in what our inventory is."
"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the ability to track what a device is doing and to go back historically. It is also able to go down to, and identify, very low levels of traffic."
"It shows us the saturation of the network of devices. It gives us a clear view of the flows in the network to understand, for instance, planning upgrades in the network to get an idea of what's going on the network on traffic flows. It gives us insight, for instance, on what's going on on our VPN Client. There are a lot of things where it provides very helpful information. It also gives us our security reports with quite detailed information on what's going on in the network, and whether there are data exfiltrations and so on."
"It's agnostic as far as what your network gear is. As long as it supports an sFlow, JFlow, NetFlow, some kind of flow monitoring, Plixer will support it very well."
"The ability to view the status of the top-10 at a glance is helpful. We immediately know which link is over-utilized or heavily used... and it's all in real-time."
"The most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer are its ease of use, accessibility, and UI."
"We didn't experience any bugs."
"As a network engineer, the ability to identify what traffic on the link is consuming all the bandwidth at any given time, and provide immediate feedback to the business, is the most valuable feature."
"One of the most valuable features of Plixer Scrutinizer is the reporting, particularly how easy it is to drill down into the reports. Another valuable feature of the solution is its overall visibility. It's great. I also liked Plixer Scrutinizer in terms of deployment time and that it's very simple to set up. Once you get the appliance set up and connected, the customer starts to see results immediately, versus other solutions where that could take a while."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"If the integration is simplified or improved, it will be a unique selling point in comparison to the competition on the market."
"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."
"The solution could improve by allowing the ability to monitor the network shortly after installing the software and adding an auto-discovery function."
"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."
"We have had one support issue that's been open for a couple of months, and it is currently open."
"The CA Technologies sales team destroyed their relationship with our business units."
"I wish the reporting side was easier to work with, but it does a decent job. I also wish the reporting side was a little more intuitive or they offered more reporting examples."
"It would be useful if there was a way to back up the configuration information. E.g., if you wanted to deploy a new instance or disaster recovery, you could quite easily deploy and restore the config, as opposed to having to restore all the NetFlow data. If there was just a button that said "backup config information", that would be good."
"There was a price lift because previously the product was privately owned, and now there is some external capital in the organization, so pricing could be lower, though, for Plixer Scrutinizer, there is almost no competition at this price point."
"The reporting structure, the front-end GUI, also needs some work. It needs some getting used to. It works fairly well, but it's a technical tool rather than a user tool. You have to understand the structure of the databases before you can really use it."
"Knowing that they're coming out with a new user interface, that is an area where there is room for improvement. There are so many variables. They should limit the variables in the user interface and create some classes, like "simple," "novice," and "expert" to narrow down the variables within it."
"The solution creates a visual map of a particular location and how the network flows. You need to spend time to generate all those maps. If they could figure out a way to reduce the time needed to generate the maps, that would be great."
"From what I understand it is that the solution is not very scalable in a high volume traffic environment with a large number of flows."
"The visual acuity of how it presents data can sometimes be confusing. It takes a bit for people to spin up how to look at the graphs."
DX Spectrum is ranked 13th in Network Monitoring Software with 115 reviews while Plixer Scrutinizer is ranked 48th in Network Monitoring Software with 15 reviews. DX Spectrum is rated 8.4, while Plixer Scrutinizer is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of DX Spectrum writes "Comprehensive alerts, beneficial overall network viability, and scalability not limited". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Plixer Scrutinizer writes "Advanced reporting runs analytics on NetFlow and provides signature-based recognition of problems in the network environment". DX Spectrum is most compared with DX NetOps, Zabbix, SolarWinds NPM, Cisco DNA Center and ThousandEyes, whereas Plixer Scrutinizer is most compared with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, Flowmon , ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, Cisco Secure Network Analytics and LiveAction LiveNX. See our DX Spectrum vs. Plixer Scrutinizer report.
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