Recently I put together a little summary for my management. Hopefully this will help, it's some excerpts from that doc:
Scalability - we have well over 150,000 devices being monitored by our environment. Many others have brought in their tool of the day, but none have been able to keep up with the massive volume of events and alarms that Spectrum keeps up with. The DSS gives us this scalability.
Resiliency - We are running Hot redundant pairs. The servers are located in physically separated areas, so that a hit to one part of the network will not impact our ability to monitor our assets. This not only gives us 24x7 monitoring with near 100% availability, but also gives us the flexibility to perform maintenance tasks anytime, not just during a "maintenance" window.
Customizability - We have over 200 customized management modules. This has let us build custom monitoring for non-standard equipment. These management modules were all done in house, no consulting dollars were required. Many tools out there are basic frameworks that consulting companies are pushing, saying that they can customize the tool for your needs. What that ends up meaning is that the few dollars that you spend on the tool are nothing compared to the massive funds that will be required for customizing it the way you want, and for enhancing in the future.
Flexibility - Spectrum is the "clearing house" for most of our other tools. We have the integration to the ticketing systems, the business logic systems. So other tools send their information to Spectrum for us to connect them to those systems. Thanks to Southbound Gateway, Event Rules and Event Procedures, we can take data from various other management tools, redirect that data to models within Spectrum. Add to that the REST capabilities and the flexibility can be expanded many times over.
Intelligence - Fault Isolation helps to identify the root cause of an issue. Event rules let us process the massive volume of events and distill those into a much smaller set of actionable alarms. Event Procedures gives us a way to extend the event processing programatically.
Security - Spectrums security mechanism lets us share the admin responsibility without worrying about different groups stepping on each other. We are a small central team taking care of the tool and consulting with others. The bulk of the changes are done by the distributed teams of people working on their own areas. We have made it very self service.
Hopefully that was not too much. Spectrum has been a big part of our management infrastructure for over 15 years. We have had numerous tools brought in by various teams, all trying to replace Spectrum and all disappearing after failing.