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CA Application Delivery Analysis [EOL] vs DX Spectrum comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CA Application Delivery Ana...
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
DX Spectrum
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (7th), Network Monitoring Software (17th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (18th), Network Troubleshooting (6th), DX NetOps (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1237194 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solution Director, DevOps at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Good monitoring functionality, but technical support and integration with other products need to be improved
My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances. For CA Spectrum, the integration of this product is something that needs to be improved. Even some of their point products to not integrate very well, and ADA is one of them. The user interface needs to be improved. Technical support needs to be improved.
PinchasAlbalya - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Monitoring has become centralized and management now sees real‑time health of key network assets
The time investment required is significant, not because of difficulty but because of the need for free time to invest in it. We need to get the knowledge. We know there are many options, but we took an external vendor to install and make the customization. If we want to make others changes without paying for customization, we need to learn it deeply by ourselves. The tutorials are very complicated. They could work on that area. The tutorial part could be more simplified. I know there are many explanations, and you can get help or documents in one click on the current page in the product, but it is not very clear. If you want to do something new that you did not see from the vendor in the installation, it is not very simple. The documents are good for people that know how to operate the product well, but for new users, it is not simple.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The pricing is relatively low compared to other solutions in this area, and I'd go so far as to say it's even significantly less than the competition."
"The most valuable feature is the fault management monitoring."
"Once it is setup and seeing traffic, it is an impressive tool to show potential problems long before the general users are complaining."
"Technical support is excellent."
"The great aspect about the CA Spectrum tool is not what it does, but the integration that it provides with the other CA monitoring tools, such as CA APM."
"It has a high-quality graphical interface."
"What I like best is the configuration management functionality."
"The most valuable features have been the interface and the ability to do equipment management."
"​The stability of the product is key. It never breaks, really. The stability and reliability of the Spectrum product have been top-notch.​"
"The Global Collections are what I found to be most valuable. With the Global Collections, you're able to organize and categorize devices into "folders," or functional groups and categories, so that it doesn't matter which SpectroSERVER those devices are on."
"Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing."
"The valuable features of this tool are its scalability and ability to automate inputs and outputs of a closed system."
 

Cons

"My biggest complaint about ADA is that you have to rely on dedicated appliances."
"Upgrades can be quite complex."
"Hard to setup right, hard to get the conversations right."
"It is not the best product on the market, but it is better than the competition if you were comparing prices."
"The user interface needs improvement."
"For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts."
"The only pain point I have is some issues with support and the timeliness of getting a resolution."
"The Systems Performance Agent is powerful, but, for example, if you want to run a sql query and set a threshold against the returned value, you can’t directly."
"For us, the implementation was quite complex but it's because of the large number of different environments we're dealing with."
"It's really tough to say because it really does have a lot to do with how much time you put into it."
"It took a while to understand the product, but once we went hands on, it's great to work with."
"I would say integration between performance monitoring and CA Spectrum, as well as improved graphing capabilities."
"I would like to see improvement in the ability of the user to configure the maintenance mode more efficiently."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive solution and there is a single price to pay for licensing, with no options."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"Since the acquisition by Broadcom, we have not had such a good experience with licensing and pricing. Since they were bought by Broadcom, every sales contract is getting complicated. It's very complicated, and it's much more expensive than before. It's not a good pricing strategy from Broadcom."
"The price is very high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise90
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
The time investment required is significant, not because of difficulty but because of the need for free time to invest in it. We need to get the knowledge. We know there are many options, but we to...
What is your primary use case for DX Spectrum?
The university purchased DX Spectrum, called ICE. DX Spectrum NAC is working for us only on Cisco 9200 switches. It is not working on any other switch like C1000 or HG or any 2960X. Even other Cisc...
 

Also Known As

CA ADA, Application Delivery Analysis, NetQoS SuperAgent
CA Spectrum
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ERGO
National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, Fortinet, Skyline Communications and others in Network Management Applications. Updated: October 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.