DX Spectrum vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

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

Incentivized

We have taken advantage of the single platform for different IT disciplines over the past few years and now we are doing more and more with the integrations. Our teams are looking at the same information which stops the blame game a lot. Their newest AIOps has been a very nice surprise as we've tried another tool for about 2 years and it required us to hire outside consultants to try and build what we needed. So far, ServiceNow found a lot of things we didn't know to look for. It's not perfect in fixing everything, but really has provided a lot of visibility and troubleshooting.

• Polling and traps can be configured to take heartbeats at specified intervals and notify on an event in real-time, respectively.
• Topology of devices gives a high-level overview of network architecture.
• Discovery of devices is simple and secure with the use of community strings.
• Details can be added per device or alarm type for actions to be taken to make troubleshooting easier.

Incentivized

• license management
• Integrate with other tools
• Dashboards
• Change Management - impact analysis

Incentivized

• NOC
• Data Center/Telecom

Incentivized

• A lot of flexibility in the licensing options which can get overwhelming.
• They are just starting to get into helping with DevOps so I don't have as much experience there but it's a challenge for us.
• Pricing negotiations - although that can be pretty much every vendor.

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.

Incentivized

We wanted it integrated with ITSM and ITBM. Prioir to that we used JIRA for agile development and SysAid for ticketing. So we started with converting SysAid. We went live with Vanilla ITSM. Then we could have a basis for ITOM. However, we needed to migrated from JIRA to ITSM. Only then we felt mature enough to examine ITOM, which required quite a lot of resources. You need networking, motoring, IT and Cyber security team members in your project!!

Incentivized

• Proactive monitoring for networking
• To many times to plan an update

Incentivized

• Eliminated a lot of manual processes with automation and sharing information across team.
• Cleaned up our CMDB from well below 40% accurate to well over 90%.
• AIOps finding anomalies and tying them to service maps.