Network Monitoring with CA Spectrum
Rating: 9 out of 10
March 22, 2017
Vetted Review
Verified User
4 years of experience
CA Spectrum is being used by the monitoring, network technician, and network engineering teams at our organization. This keeps operations proactively aware of any preemptive issues, degradations, and outages within the network infrastructure. The monitoring team validates that the event is true, network technicians repair physical connections, while the network engineers configure the network devices.
- 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.
Cons
- Searching multiple devices of different IP ranges or hostnames simultaneously.
- Setting manual maintenance mode on a device to use current time as start time.
- Report generation.
- Compared to competitors, CA Spectrum leverages affordability and effectiveness.
- Proactive solution to get a head start on Mean Time To Repair (MTTR).
- Outages can be prevented. Ex) A network switch connected to a UPS (to protect from blackouts and power surges) on a failed battery will notify net techs thru Spectrum to replace the battery before it is depleted and causes an outage to users.
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.