DX Spectrum Valuable Features

DC
Senior Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The most valuable features of DX Spectrum are the comprehensive alerts.

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

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.

In this tool, there's a distributed setup and you can have multiple SpectroSERVERs. Normally the devices that are on a SpectroSERVER are local to that SpectroSERVER. But with the OneClick Console and the Global Collections concept, you can take devices from any SpectroSERVER and put them in a group. You're then able to manage those devices from the Global Collections, which span across your SpectroSERVERs. That's one of the most valuable features of the tool because it allows for really efficient management of your devices, especially in a really large distributed environment.

Another really good feature is what's called SANM, the Spectrum Alarm Notification Manager. It allows you to produce notifications based on certain things that are happening. Each SANM notification runs as its own individual process. If one SANM notification stopped working for some reason, it wouldn't affect all the other ones. That's a really good feature as well.

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

If you are looking for the right monitoring tool, Spectrum is one of the best solutions. It covers networks very well. It has all the capabilities that you're looking for when it comes to monitoring. Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing. If you have a CA Service Desk, then it can be integrated so that if you have open tickets they can be closed automatically. The configuration manager is great as well. 

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Buyer's Guide
AppNeta by Broadcom vs. DX Spectrum
March 2024
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UW
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The capability of handling and monitoring with SNMP and working with the SNMP traps is much better than other products.

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NR
Solution Architect at Infosys
  • Event management
  • Fault management
  • NFV support
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HR
CSI manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The fault management is perfect. You have alerts just in time.

The interface is user friendly.

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it_user558423 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at New York Presbyterian Hospital

The most valuable feature is it’s ability to monitor our network. We have a fairly sizable network with over 4000 nodes. Ultimately, at a hospital, network integrity is a patient care issue, so you want to make sure that the network is up as close to 100% as possible, 24/7 365. Hospitals don't close, so it needs to support that.

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

Some of the most valuable features are:

  • The ability to have a topographical map of our infrastructure
  • Downstream suppression
  • The ability to capture SNMP traps from non-network devices
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SW
Senior NMS Architect at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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. 

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

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

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JS
Network Systems Integration Engineer at University of Michigan Health System

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.

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ZH
Director at Starways

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

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

The topology correlation for layers one, two, three, and four significantly reduces the number of false positives (>98% ratio). By using Spectrum, we did not need to configure the network knowledge about redundancy. Rather, it learns the latest correlation between the monitored elements automatically.

By adding the alerting from the Broadcom performance management tools, a comprehensive list of alerts is created.

As a service provider, we added views for our customers to inspect their sub-domain in our whole network, which reinforces a high level of trust within the relationship to our customers.

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LG
Big Data Architect en Seguros SURA at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Network Configuration Manager
  • MPLS & VPN Manager
  • Southbound Gateway
  • Event Rules
  • Event Procedures
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it_user353325 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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

The most valuable feature is the event correlation mechanism.

I also like the product's multi-customer approach.

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it_user778728 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at GEICO

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

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it_user516528 - PeerSpot reviewer
OSS Manager at Telefónica UK / O2
  • REST API: The single most undersold feature of CA Spectrum is the REST API!
  • Customisation: Very customisable under the hood and using standard features.
  • Reliable: It just works. I've been using Spectrum for more than five years and it just keeps getting better.

The REST API allowed us to automate a lot of the manual work required to add devices into Spectrum. This included:

  • Installing the product via ‘silent installer’ based on one config file (installer would look at hostname and find out what role the server was and installed only those components. It also saves a DB if it’s a primary, and then loads the DB if it’s a secondary failover).
  • Adding users from LDAP (you need to create the users in LDAP in spectrum, and then it uses LDAP after that).
  • The automated deployment scripts we have first locally check if the devices are reachable via ICMP, SNMP, TFTP, etc., and then, if successful, it will add it to Spectrum in a specific container location. This contains logic which allows us to allocate which server in the Spectrum domain the device is deployed on and also checks to see if it exists on any other landscapes and deletes the devices that it’s not meant to be on only if the device exists on the correct landscape.

Other automation is the automatic creation of Global Collections, and a custom reporting ‘engine’ that allows us to query data from within Spectrum (e.g., 'Show me all alarms for devices running iOS version x which were created in the last hour' or 'Show me all devices which are running iOS versions not starting with 15.’).

Another thing that REST is good for is querying attributes for a specific model type. E.g., the VNM models contain info such as number of traps received, number of ignored traps, etc. When using tools like RRDTool, you can graph these over time and see how your Spectrum environment is doing.

These are the main areas and I’m looking to do a similar job for CA Performance Management. Once this is done, there is a lot of config management (i.e., management of Cisco configs) I want to do as even configs are stored in Spectrum models via attributes.

The best thing about Spectrum is the way it has been designed 'under the hood’. The concept of models with relationships to other models and each model having attributes. This makes a lot of information available that can be obtained very fast, instead of having to try do everything via VNM shell or GUI.

I was using VNM shell for years and typically ran scripts on each host and had to manage each host and the scripts (which were mostly always the same but nonetheless still a pain to administer). Most information is obtainable via VNMShell but you have to ‘stitch’ the info from each landscape together. With the REST API, it’s one call and it checks all landscapes.

What I also like about the REST API is that you can have a separate host running all the scripts. This allows for a much cleaner Spectrum build and less complications when upgrading.

Spectrum is what I like to call a good CMDB product. Once you have discovered the devices, you have a good CMDB to use to populate other tools. You can create custom attributes via the Model Type Editor and use Spectrum as your ‘single pane of glass’, which contains all the info a NOC/support team needs (e.g., you can import device reference numbers, circuit refs, addresses, contact numbers, etc.), so all the info is in one place. This can all be populated via REST API at discovery time.

It took me some time to get to understand the REST API and enjoy scripting, so the initial time investment was needed - but now it’s paying off and saving me a lot of time.

Back when I started to tinker with it, there was not a lot of documentation. This has vastly improved over the years and the APIs are getting better in terms of documentation and updated features.

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GD
Lead Tower Monitoring at libero

It's a good tool. It's simple to do the configuration. It has good discovery and integration.

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

This product automates much of what is involved in monitoring. For instance, device discovery can be performed in any of a number of ways with minimal manual intervention. The model catalog in Spectrum (digital models for various physical or virtual devices) is very extensive so, in most cases, monitoring uses device models that precisely match the actual device. This provides excellent tailored monitoring ability. Spectrum can be set up as fully fault-tolerant and in that scenario, it can provide near 100% monitoring up-time; five-nines monitoring up-time is certainly attainable.

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

Most valuable to us are the alerting capabilities and the topology information that Spectrum provides, as well as additional services such as device updates and the ability to launch them. These are typical network management services.

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

Event Correlation and Topology features are by far CA Spectrum's strongest point. That means with its Topology, we can map out the architecture, and then with Event Suppression, if we lose an event upstream, all those downstream events that go through that path, they are suppressed.

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

Auto discovery helps us reduce manual efforts. CA Spectrum automatically discovers all network Cis, including LANs, WANs and all the connected assets and creates the actual topology view.

Network configuration manager (NCM) help us configure capture. It helps detect unauthorized changes and delivers immediate notification.

Root-case analysis (RCA) helps us correlate the symptoms and probable causes for the events. It helps the MTTR and save engineers’ efforts.

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it_user558357 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Of Staff at Aig

It is helpful from the monitoring perspective and can be integrated with other tools, so that's what I find it good for.

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

This is a very powerful tool with a lot of functionality. Once you have completed the training and have some experience using it, it's a very useful and powerful tool. 

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

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.

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

The root cause analysis, fault isolation engine, and the overall event management that Spectrum brings you.  

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LG
Big Data Architect en Seguros SURA at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Network Configuration Manager
  • MPLS & VPN Manager
  • Southbound Gateway
  • Event rules
  • Event procedures
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FB
Senior IT Manager at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Works excellent for heterogeneous networks (lots of different vendors)
  • Error correlation
  • Root-cause analysis
  • Service intelligence
  • Lots of add-on products for Spectrum, e.g., VMware integration
  • Local extensions/developments for special needs, e.g., new vendor xyz

With the object-oriented design of Spectrum, from its very first version, we had very important issues, such as fault isolation and root-cause analysis implemented by default!! Which means that we had through all these years very precise fault indications on where to look for the error and were not overwhelmed by long lists of alarm, which were only effects of the real fault.

So we then concentrated on building a virtual picture of the complete real IT infrastructure inside Spectrum. This includes today a very wide range of devices, which are modelled inside Spectrum and interconnected in the correct hierarchy as in the real environment. And, as the big buzzword today is IoT, this means for us as a service provider to our university users to deal with MoT = Monitoring of Things!!

The “new” things include devices such as coffee machines, fridges, temperature sensors, worktime badge systems, door opening scanners, house automation systems (for light, sun blinds, climate, etc.), smoke and fire detectors, etc. This list increases every year with new “things” popping up on our network radar!

Of course, the real IT devices like routers, switches, firewalls, servers, storage devices, WiFi access points, IP phones, and, importantly, printers, form the base of the big “virtual” Spectrum picture.

And last but not least, Spectrum by design can be expanded in its function by a series of add-ons, such as VMware integration, which reads out automatically the virtual servers in the vCenter and models all VM’s inside Spectrum in the corresponding physical servers. Another example of an add-on is the integration of a performance probe with scenarios that run periodically (i.e., log in to a webmail portal, check for the existance of a message xyz, lookup the calendar, etc.) and map those scenarios to objects within Spectrum, which can be handled like devices, so you can put thresholds on them and get alarmed when violated!

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Baris Isiklilar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at BTBilgi

The product’s stability and robustness are valuable. It is capable of efficient fault management irrespective of the size of the network.

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it_user778896 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Manager at Delta Air Lines, Inc.
  • The ability to quickly identify and isolate incidents.
  • Automate ticketing

With the service manager today, we are moving the service now into the future.

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it_user778638 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Of Monitoring Service Delivery at American International Group
  • The correlation
  • The integration point
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it_user572898 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Charter Communications, Inc.

A valuable feature is the topology view. You can view the topology. Other valuable features are the host configuration, the NCM feature, the policy manager that it has and the scalability. That's one of the biggest ones.

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it_user558144 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at Northwell health

It's a very mature product. It has a lot of features. It has fault root-cause analysis, so you can see a fault and know that those 10 or 50 additional faults are all related to that one. You don't get 50 messages. You just get one root cause.

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

The flexibility. It is so customizable. You can about make it do anything you want it to do, if you can figure out how to make it do it. There are things you can do in it to customize it to your environment and make it meet your business needs. I do not know if I have seen other products in this space that are as flexible.

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

It makes sure that the company network is doing what it's supposed to do.

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

With Spectrum, you have a complete insight into your entire infrastructure. You can look at your network system applications and pinpoint issues and problems for analysis. It's one of the premiere products that are out there.

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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

It is a complete and ready-to-use tool. It has many features compared to other competitors.

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

The presentation layer is pretty simple and straightforward and the dashboard is pretty easy to read.

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

Easy navigation from initial alerts to a full topology and detail on the Network infrastructure and it relationships is the most valuable feature

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

The feature that I find most valuable, but I don't see used often enough, is really applying the fault tolerance. In the last two companies I've worked with, they always categorized or contained different type of devices. There were routers in one box and firewalls and other switches elsewhere. They really shoot themselves in the foot because you need to be able to understand in the grand universe what's breaking down where and why. Where on the path is the issue occurring?

Even though this seems to become a very strong part of the application, it's not really being applied because people want to categorize and put everything into little boxes. They don't really understand global collections. That's where you would categorize devices by types or something of that nature. That's something I've been trying to promote in our own company to really get a better sense of a more organic view of the network. We can then see if the problem is with a server, a switch in between, a router, or a firewall. We want to know where along the path is the issue occurring.

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it_user378384 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect EMS Practice at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Auto discovery helps us reduce manual efforts. CA Spectrum automatically discovers all network Cis, including LANs, WANs and all the connected assets and creates the actual topology view.
  • Network configuration manager (NCM) help us configure capture. It helps detect unauthorized changes and delivers immediate notification.
  • Root-case analysis (RCA) helps us correlate the symptoms and probable causes for the events. It helps the MTTR and save engineers’ efforts.
View full review »
Purneswara Rao - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at KyndleIT Consulting

We can monitor MPLS network VPN, network configuration, and backups. It's highly scalable for network configuration management.

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Baris Isiklilar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at BTBilgi

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. 

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

The most valuable feature is automatic discovery.

The event correlation is a helpful feature.

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

The main thing is obviously notifications about alerts, getting ahead of the curve to make sure that we do not have system going down, or if it is down we get to know it earlier. If it is going to go down or if it is down, we get to know it earlier. If it is going to go down, we also get to know it because if the servers degraded and so on, we get to work on it before it really has any business impact.

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

I have found the cross-analysis feature to be the most valuable. The many alerts you get have an impact on the connectivity, so you need a very good correlation for layer 1, layer 2, layer 3, and layer 4, layered at the understanding of the technology, which locates the spectrum. It's really unique in this type of solution.

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

There are many valuable features but the ability to have all the inventory reports, event reports, configuration management. 

It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one. That's one of its strengths.

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it_user558489 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate UEM Technologist at Sheetz inc

What I like about the latest that they came out with is that 10.2 looks like it's going to be better, and they added a web console. I like the HTML5 fact of it, because it's a lot easier for me to get to my admins and other elements like that so they can look at their own stuff without having to sift through a bunch of stuff. I really like the web console addition, and from what I see from the 10.2, the whole thing is going to be HTML5. I really think that that's going to be real beneficial as far as me getting people convinced to use it and to actually look at it, instead of coming to me all the time for help.

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DM
Network Manager at SMA

The most valuable feature is the auto-discovery, which is nice because you don't have to do anything to add a new component. It will just supervise the links.

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

The fact that I don't have to sit and watch things. They get monitored, and then I hear about them and take care of them as needed.

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

It has many great features, but in most of the companies that I have done consulting for, they rarely use them as it requires an advanced level of knowledge of the tool.

Event Configuration: A tool in its simplest form creates business logic around events. For example, generate an alarm if Event A occurs and if Event B doesn’t occur within 30 seconds. In its hardest form, you can create a custom state machine for very hard business logic.

Event Correlation: Spectrum has out-of-the-box correlation, but with this tool, you can create custom ones. You can make some alarms hide inside another alarm as a symptom, get root cause analysis, and avoid unnecessary notifications/alarms on the screen.

Topology view: The topology diagrams on CA Spectrum look very nice and they are very useful. We stopped using them because with more than10K devices, the administration was just too painful.

Dynamic models: Integration with the CA Spectrum is awesome. Sending traps with the third-party tools and using the SBG to receive them requires a learning curve. However, once you get it, it is very simple. Unlike another tool, you don’t need to know what the third-party tool is monitoring. In other words, if it sends some data, it will be dynamically created in CA Spectrum.

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it_user558009 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Engineer at Interval International

Spectrum is the total alarm management utility. All event alarms are displayed in one place. We use it as a complete infrastructure management tool. All our third-party tools report into Spectrum. That's probably the most valuable part of this software that we use.

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

With CA Spectrum Southbound Gateway, it is possible to receive alarm data and turn it into events. With events, it is possible to correlate ICs, other events and shape any function to its will.

The southbound gateway can receive data from third party sources, other monitoring products, like SCOM from Microsoft, using the Southbound Gateway you can centralize all Management in one view, you receive SNMP data from other tools and turns in events, events in CA Spectrum turns in to Alarms, QOS or reports.

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

The network monitoring features are the product’s most valuable, due to the lack of these capabilities in any other monitoring tool. No other application monitors networks as well as Spectrum.

Free tools are available to do what its other features do, such as server monitoring (CPU/memory/disk).

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

The most valuable feature for us is that we can model a large variety of devices and receive SNMP traps from them.

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

The stability of the product is key. It never breaks, really. The stability and reliability of the Spectrum product have been top-notch.

The only reason you're not going to know that your stuff is up and running is because you set it up wrong, not because it's not doing its job.

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

The network mapping functionality.

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

Implemented with Enterprise Customers across region. Very strong Fault Management tool , Extra ordinary correlation & alarming. Not to difficult to implement but eventually adv. correlation is not easy to implement.

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it_user558537 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head IT Operations at ICBC Argentina

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.

We are also beginning to implement SOI, in order to view our IT infrastructure from a business perspective. As the boundary between business and IT become more confusing, it becomes more valuable to our users that we in IT can easily and quickly understand the impact of IT services within the business. SOI and Spectrum allow us to achieve this. We can optimize the IT services we offer our users and get a quick view of the business impact. Then, we can adjust priorities and solve problems quicker.

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it_user558102 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Allscripts

It's a mature product and has been around for a long time. The technical support is up to speed and it has been well designed.

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

The ability to receive and correlate alarms and determine impacts when outages occur.

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it_user394989 - PeerSpot reviewer
TEM Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • NCM
  • Discovery: Scheduled, on-demand, synchronized with eHealth
  • REST API
  • Spectrum integration with CABI, eHealth, SOI, and EEM
  • Modelling of custom device models
  • MRTG graphs in real time for interfaces
  • Dynamic Global Collections
  • Distributed landscapes
  • OCC console client
  • Web UI console
  • Integrated GIS maps
  • Self-certification
  • Condition correlation
  • Event configuration
  • OOB Probable Cause database
  • MPLS Transport and VPN managers
  • Watches and thresholds
View full review »
JE
Presales Consultant at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

The product is rich in features, so a lot of them are valuable.

Network Configuration Manager - Backup network device configuration, enforce policies, enforce configuration and correlate configuration changes with network status. Also has an approval workflow for changes on devices.

Certification - You can certify devices in several levels. The most complex ones give you great results for your efforts, such as a certification using a Model Type Editor for a customized model type along with Event Admin to receive alerts from another source and redirect to your new models based on Name (this allows for creating virtual environments to monitor devices without IP if you have a manager with IP/SNMP for them) or IP, creating Dynamic Alarm Titles. This gives great value, because it becomes really easy for your operations team to know exactly what is happening by just looking at the alarm console, instead of searching for the problem in the alarm description.

Event Correlation - Great to map events and to correlate them before generating alarms. It works with event pairs, event count, event series and other methods; really useful.

Condition Correlation - Great for correlating alarm conditions with devices. For example, you have a router redundancy, and you don’t want two different alarms for Device Down. You can create a domain and rules to specify that if only both of the routers are down, it will generate a new alarm with the possibility to use whatever name you want for that new alarm.

Service Dashboard - This one is particularly great, because customers love it. It allows you to give them a service-oriented view of their infrastructure without having to use another tool for that. Because it’s part of CA Spectrum, the service is affected immediately after an alarm occurrence.

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

Monitoring window, graphical representation of devices, automatic updating of databases, high scalability, high robustness, and user-friendly options are some of the most valuable features for us.

It can be made to operate on a cloud with load balancing capabilities which doesn't occupy much memory. The application can be modeled to support users from different teams to intercommunicate.

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

Without a doubt the most valuable feature of this solution is its scalability. This is what Spectrum is known for and it's delivered on this for us.

It's also flexible and is able to manage all device types.

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

The valuable features of this tool are its scalability and ability to automate inputs and outputs of a closed system.

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

Network monitoring is the most valuable feature. I'd like to be able to leverage it more for capacity planning, which is my area. We use it primarily for network monitoring, alerting, and ticketing.

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it_user215913 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Alerting via SNMP traps
  • Inventory
  • WAN modeling
  • Serial numbers, etc.
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it_user191448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Functionality of the tool is awesome and it is easy for customers to use. It is a very good solution for monitoring network and servers of the organizations.

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it_user128562 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Support Analyst with 1,001-5,000 employees
Overall network topology views. Device connection status. Alerting on multiple provider devices. View full review »
CC
IT director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The solution's most valuable feature is its web interface.

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

What I like best is the configuration management functionality. I can configure a couple of devices at once, and I can certify the device in the configuration on my own, without depending on the vendor.

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it_user778827 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at Aerospace Corporation

Allows us to be proactive.

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

The most valuable feature is the detection of minor, major and warning alarms, showing through different colors. Spectrum is not SOI, but it gave the possibility of putting a view, a dashboard, showing servers that were part of a VMware server architecture.

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it_user392508 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer with 10,001+ employees

There are several features that are valuable:

  1. Fault management of different devices from various vendors;
  2. Integration with different application from other vendors is supported; and
  3. Various features to configure/customize/scale as per business requirements.
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it_user293970 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Root cause analysis
  • Configurations management
  • Device compatibility features (buit-in, MIBs and device self-certification)
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OB
CTO at a aerospace/defense firm with 201-500 employees

The most valuable features have been the interface and the ability to do equipment management.

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SO
Advanced Solutions - Sr. Strategy Advisor at GDT - General Datatech
  • Monitoring
  • The dashboard 
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FS
Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Ease of administration
  • Topology
  • Root cause identification
  • Design

Our company is sectorized and each area has its role in the process, where the administration and support of the assets are executed by specific areas. However, the operation and NOC 24x7 require quick, visual understanding and with clear alarms to trigger the affected team as soon as possible, minimizing impacts.

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it_user558534 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Planning And Control at ICBC Argentina

As a bank, we use CA Spectrum to manage about 400 ATMs and 300 self-service terminals. We monitor this equipment network for alarms and other events. With Spectrum, we can determine how well the equipment is working and what services are available. Many of the issues are related to printing or paper supply.

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it_user492783 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We consolidated multiple enterprise monitoring tools into a single toolset (using UIM and Spectrum integrated) that provides a vision of services, topologies, network configuration backup, network configuration scripts to configure devices in groups, MPLS vision, VPN vision, global collections to give a vision of branches, and ability to group network devices by priority.

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EP
Senior Technical Consultant at The Instillery

The topology view, Global Collections and Fault Isolation algorithms pinpoint the exact point of failure.

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it_user217680 - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Security Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • The ease of discovery of managed devices into the tool set
  • The ease of placement of managed devices into the tool set
  • The integration with CA Service Desk
  • Email integration
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AQ
Security Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Scalability
  • Customizability
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KN
Techincal Support at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

This product provides good visibility into applications at the backend.

Some of our customers like the Service Desk aspect of it.

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it_user218196 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a government with 11-50 employees

Actually, the whole network is monitored with this product.

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

There are many feature which are really good for business, and a few among them are

  • Fault isolation which helps to control the unnecessary flood of alerts
  • NCM (Network Configuration Manager) - To capture the configuration backup of the network, devices which have out of box features for Cisco devices
  • Out of box integration with other CA products like Nimsoft(UIM), APM, eHealth to provide CA as a complete solution in the environment
  • Integration with Service desk (ITSM) tool for ticket automation in an environment
  • Integration with 3rd party tools as it can receive the traps and then can be converted into meaningful alarms.
  • Ability to import MIB"s for different Vendor devices.
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it_user140679 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are a number of features that make this product to standout from other competing products:

  • Easy implementation with scalable architecture
  • Seamless HA capabilities with no issues
  • Integrations with other products including both north/south bound capabilities
  • NCM - Network Configuration Manager for Device level configurations
  • Expert CA support for the product.
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DR
Network Operations & Delivery Head for TSB Bank at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the availability to put health checks in place not only for the infrastructure but for some of the services that are on top of the infrastructure. This allows us to identify the performance of the infrastructure.

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

It is the perfect monitoring solution for customers' devices. Searching and locating of the reported device is very easy. The Discovery option is very great and fast solution to model a very huge network and also small networks.

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it_user874995 - PeerSpot reviewer
Support Engineer Management Area at Acuntia

All the features are working fine.

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it_user405477 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I like the flexibility CA Spectrum offers to model networks with devices and different locations and technologies. 

It is easy to use and offers a lot out-of-the-box features (i.e. multi-vendor support, network discovery). 

If necessary there are also APIs to develop our own integrations.

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

The breath of the product.

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it_user345651 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Simac Techniek NV

It's easy to implement. I've used it for 15 years so I may be biased, but that's also a testament to how easy it is to use.

It's also very configurable. You can add features as you'd like. For example, you can easily add new alerts and watch lists. We can easily certify new devices and watch the behavior of these new devices out of the box.

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

The one-click console.

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it_user201033 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA Management Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
  • IT Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Fault Management
  • Topology Views
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it_user83484 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Data Science at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

These features are core requirements for infrastructure management:

  • Topology Discovery
  • Configuration Management
  • Best network root-cause analysis
  • Service management
  • Integration with CA SOI and CA SDM
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it_user96264 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA Technical Support Engineer/Fujitsu Regional Service Delivery Manager for PZ Cussons West africa at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Root-cause analysis and modelling pinpoint the exact cause of problems, which makes life easier.

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it_user234849 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Performance & Capacity Analyst with 10,001+ employees

Availability and outages reporting is valuable.

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it_user198879 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network/System Engineer TL at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Reliability
  • Stability

These are valuable because of the integration with CA Service Desk and the application of incident and event management in our environment.

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

Root cause analysis, fault isolation, customizations, and CA support tech access.

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it_user558648 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees

The most valuable feature is that after setup, using it is very straightforward. Configuration was very simple, and the technical support was also good.

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

It provides several valuable features, including Spectrum Core, Report Manager, and VM Manager.

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it_user202551 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It is an excellent product. It is probably one of the best we have seen in terms of being able to do mass configurations in the network.

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

The ability to monitor your WAN and LAN infrastructure in a simple GUI.

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

Alarm Monitoring

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it_user204822 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees

I used to use it for the server but switched to Nimsoft because it's much better for servers.

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

The most valuable features start with the core feature fault management and then the Configuration Manager; Service Manager; Watches; event management and event correlation; MIB tools; and the fact that it is fully customizable.

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it_user525810 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead ,Managed Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The alarm and root cause analysis features are the most valuable to me. These features help to pinpoint causes of outages and performance issues.This ultimately identifies the specific component responsible for an issue thus accelerating problem/issue resolution.

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it_user401589 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Analyst Level 3 with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Event Correlation
  • Relationship between the services delivery infrastructure
  • Policy creation by events
  • Root Cause
  • Attribute monitoring
  • Integration with other tools
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it_user216501 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • NCM backup
  • Ease of going through the event history
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it_user890010 - PeerSpot reviewer
Coordenador de Suporte - Command Center at Agility Networks

For networks:

  • CA Spectrum
  • CA eHealth

For applications:

  • CA UIM
  • Zabbix has always supported us in custom monitoring, scripting, etc.
View full review »
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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.