AppNeta vs. TotalView

AppNeta is awesome for getting site-to-site statistics or trying to find out why at 3 am every night, this server loses connectivity to another server in a different data center. But we have found the multiple bugs in the hardware hard to deal with when the devices are a 4-hour plane ride away and require someone to console into the device.

Incentivized

TotalView is well suited for an infrastructure where you are looking for a cost-effective, additive network management tool for in-depth device diagnostic information. This will not be a one-stop shop application, but it does what is advertised very well. SNMP is required for configuration and adding additional devices is quick and simple. This product also works well with Shoretel VoIP systems and allows for a full overview of connected phones along with being able to view calls on an extension/IP basis.

• AppNeta provides detailed application availability & uptime.
• AppNeta provides great longitudinal data regarding how the applications perform including an overall grade or "AppDex."
• AppNeta sends notifications of service downtime that aids in technical dispatch.

Incentivized

• The setup is fast and easy - 500 devices in 20 minutes.
• The ability to go back a day or a week in time allows us to more easily troubleshoot the "what happened at 3 a.m. yesterday" question.
• It gives us easily accessible stats for checks and balances like device types, counts, models, serial number etc.

• Hardware has a lot of bugs.
• Auto-updates cannot be turned off on the hardware, causing blips in monitoring.

Incentivized

• If you have some complexities in your network addressing, the network diagram tool will lay everything out automatically, but it will be confusing to look at. There is a way to edit the diagram so it looks more intuitive, but it may require some time to edit everything the right way.
• TotalView will count virtual interfaces such as voice dial-peers and service modules as "ports," which counts against your license count. However, there is a way to edit each device to remove these "false positives" so it doesn't suck up licenses, but it can take some time to clean those up.

Timely support is one of AppNeta's strong suits. But the ability to develop permeant fixes for issues within there product is where they lack.

Incentivized

We currently use Nagios/GroundWork and Cacti to perform network monitoring. AppNeta's UI is far superior.

Incentivized

The three tools listed do different things with some similarities. For us the biggest need was data analysis, semi-automatic troubleshooting, and data gathering and topology mapping. TotalView hit the most of these in the price point we were looking for. Each tool has "extras," but we felt that the extras provided by TotalView were good enough and that the other tools didn't justify the cost.

• A reduction in network outages and length of network outages.
• More detailed post outage investigation available.

Incentivized

• Wuite possibly the best spent money i have recommended in my 20+ year IT career.