SPECTRUM software performs event correlation, impact analysis and root cause analysis for multiple vendors and technologies across network, system and application infrastructures. SPECTRUM uniquely offers three intelligent, automated and integrated approaches to problem solving, while also proactively communicating bi-directionally with infrastructure elements in a "trust but verify" methodology. SPECTRUM doesn't just listen for problems, it proactively talks with the infrastructure for health status and detailed diagnostic information. The end result is a cost-effective way to drive reliability, efficiency and effectiveness in managing IT infrastructure as a business service.

SPECTRUM's three Approaches to Problem Solving Are:

• model-based inductive modeling technology (IMT)
• rules-based event management system (EMS)
• policy-based condition correlation technology (CCT)

The approach avoids the often technically religious arguments whether a model-based, rules-based or policy-based system is the best solution by leveraging all three. SPECTRUM is fundamentally a model-based system. Model-based systems are adaptable to changes that regularly happen in a real-time, on-demand IT infrastructure, however, these systems are criticised because development of new models and relationships may require programming skills. Rules-based systems are flexible in allowing customers to add their own intelligence without requiring programming skills, however, these systems are criticised since rules must be constantly re-written every time there is a move/add/change. SPECTRUM combines the best of both approaches, using models to keep up with changes while leveraging easy-to-create rules running against the models to avoid the need for constant rule editing. Policy-based systems are automated means of stitching together seemingly unrelated pieces of information to determine condition and state of physical devices and logical services. This condition correlation engine combines with SPECTRUM’s modeling engine and rules engine to deliver a higher level of cross-silo service analysis.

Almost every service delivery infrastructure problem can be placed into one of three categories: availability, performance or threshold exceeded. Infrastructure faults occur when things break, whether they are related to LAN/WAN, server, storage, database, application or security. Infrastructure performance problems often result in brown-out conditions where services are available but are performing poorly. A slow infrastructure is a broken infrastructure from the user's perspective. The final category is abnormal behaviour conditions where performance, utilisation or capacity thresholds have been exceeded as demand/load factors fall significantly above or below observed baselines. SPECTRUM can pinpoint the cause of availability problems and proactively monitor response time to ensure performance, while also delivering thousands of out-of-the-box thresholds to predict and/or prevent problems.

The model-based, rules-based and policy-based analytics in SPECTRUM understand relationships between IT infrastructure elements and the customers or business processes they are designed to support. It is through this understanding of relationships that SPECTRUM has been shown to deliver 70% reductions in downtime while resolving 90% of availability or performance problems from a central location. SPECTRUM's root cause analysis has been able to reduce the number of alarms by several orders of magnitude while reducing Mean-Time-to-Repair (MTTR) from hours to minutes. SPECTRUM’s distributed management architecture has also proven effective at performing root cause analysis for over 5 million devices (20+ million ports) in a single environment with fully meshed and redundant core and distribution network layers. It's integrated approach to fault and performance management has enabled enterprise, government and service provider organisations around the world to manage what matters through Service Level Intelligence™.