Cisco UCS Manager supports the entire Cisco UCS server and Cisco HyperFlex Series hyperconverged infrastructure portfolios. It enables server, fabric, and storage provisioning as well as, device discovery, inventory, configuration, diagnostics, monitoring, fault detection, auditing, and statistics collection.
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DX Spectrum
Score 7.1 out of 10
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DX Spectrum (formerly CA Spectrum) is network fault management software, from Broadcom company CA Technologies.
It [Cisco UCS Manager] is extremely well suited to large virtual infrastructure environments with resource dense blades. This solution is also great if you want to consolidate a large number of servers (if they are servers that need to stay physical, but can fit in the profile of a blade) - this would reduce data center space utilization as well as power and cooling. Cisco UCS Manager is also great if you're looking for centralized management of a larger number of servers. This would not be a great solution if you have a very small shop - it's not cheap and probably wouldn't give you a ROI if you only have a couple dozen servers total. I'd say it would be overkill for small shops, but if you have the money and don't care, you'll still like it.
As I said before, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think about how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.
Well Suited - Networking Monitoring
Less Appropriate - When you need to customize some monitoring and to update the version
Cisco UCSM Support has been very quick to reply and address our concerns, issues, and questions. We have found that Cisco's documentation is clear and concise and fairly easy to find. With Cisco support's help, we are able to quickly and safely meet the demands of our end-users, consistently.
I think UCS Manager would be able very comparable to other vendors offerings when it comes to server configuration. I think Cisco did a good job in giving you full access to many options that you might not see with Dell or HPE. Every manufacturer would need a similar tool to control their server environment, but I think what Cisco has built into their Manager is a little better than others I've used. You can just see and change so many settings. I would say that is also a bit of a negative by a little bit because sometimes it is hard to dig in and find what you need to change and often might need to reach out to TAC or take a training course to understand all of the interface.
Other tools I have used are more server/application-centric. CA Spectrum seems to work effectively and efficiently for network devices. Notification delays can be set to grant grace periods in case of network blips or false positives, which occur ALL the time. Other monitoring tools send event notifications immediately and would clear instantly, which while on-call can wake a technician for no reason.
