DX Spectrum

I've been working with this tool for ten years. We have an ongoing vendor support team and we have an in-house one. For implementation advice, I would say always plan your monitoring according to what you really need to monitor on your environment. Most of the problems we find today are related to operation process issues and not the tool at all. People have to know what they want before implementing the solution. The main valuable features for CA Spectrum are the network monitoring features, they 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).

We are not using the latest version of the tool yet, but as far as I know, I think improving the reporting of data would be a good idea. The report area is very poor and we cannot work properly with additional information and the custom reports. We just use the default report for information that we have inside the database for these reports. To be honest, Spectrum is one of the most stable and less problematic solutions that we work with. It’s easy to scale and to deploy. The only time we’ve had problems with it was with some upgrading processes. It is not so intuitive and you have to make sure everything is correct. The CA support team is really capable and efficient when it comes to Spectrum. Most of the time they help us surprisingly fast and correctly. Setting up general monitoring is straightforward. However, if you need something different than the standard setup, some customizations need to be done. Thus, it becomes more complex as a whole.

As I’ve written, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.