DX Spectrum (formerly CA Spectrum) is network fault management software, from Broadcom company CA Technologies.
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Jira Software
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Jira Software is a project management tool from Atlassian, featuring an interactive timeline for mapping work items, dependencies, and releases, Scrum boards for agile teams, and out-of-the-box reports and dashboards.
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
The Jira software works well for managing scrum boards and allocating resources to a task. When your Epics and Issues are set up properly, it can give you a good idea of where your team stands and the trajectory of your project. It is not the ideal solution if you need to provide documentation and support to people outside of your product teams or organization. It would benefit from having a public documentation or repository feature.
This is because Jira Software generates a huge profit for an affordable price. Having a tool that makes team management transparent and effective is very valuable.
In addition, the renewal of Jira Software and all Atlassian tools is predictable and clear, as the prices are published on the Atlassian website and there is no pyramid of intermediaries.
JIRA Software is a pretty complex tool. We have a project manager for JIRA who onboarded us, created our board, and taught us the basics. I think it would have been pretty overwhelming to learn without her. JIRA offers so much functionality that I'm not aware of -- I constantly need to Google or ask others about existing features. Also, although they are all under the Atlassian umbrella, I find it difficult to switch between JIRA Software and Confluence.
Our JIRA support is handled internally by members of our Product Support team. It is not supported by a 3rd party. Our internal support will always sent out notifications for downtime which is usually done on the weekend unless it is required to fix a bug/issue that is affecting the entire company. Downtime is typically 3-4 hours and then once the maintenance is complete, another broadcast email is sent out informing the user community that the system is now available for use.
One of their strong points i stheir documentation. Almost all of the basic set up needed within JIRA is available online through atlassian and its easy to find and very precise. The more critical issues need to be addressed as well and hence the rating of 8 instead of a 9.
Take your time implementing Jira. Make sure you understand how you want to handle your projects and workflows. Investing more time in the implementation can pay off in a long run. It basically took us 5 days to define and implement correctly, but that meant smooth sailing later on.
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.
Jira Software has more integrations and has more features than many of its competitors. While some of its competitors do have better UI/UX than Jira Software, they have improved this greatly over time. Atlassian also acquired Trello years ago, so that adds better user interfaces to the system. They do also offer a pretty in-depth library of how to customize the platform that others don't.
