Munin vs. PathSolutions TotalView

Single window to look for hardware statistics and application monitoring. Easy to configure, and a lot of stuff is available online related to its configuration. However, the team at Munin should work on the mobile applications as well and also look for bundling professional services at a cost. That will be helpful for startups to hook to Munin instead of running across websites for the integration.

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.

• Hardware stats.
• Application stats.
• Ease of admin.
• Simple interface.

• 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.

• Mobile application.
• Pre builtin modules for unix, cisco, hp devices.
• Alert Notifications over SMS and call.
• Web hook integrations with Slack, pagerduty etc.

• 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.

Ease of admin and relatively easy to configure. People have been using it for decades, so the market is well aware of its functionality, and you will get answers to most of the questions or problems. Community support is also there to seek advice. In a nutshell, people are well aware, and it's stable.

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.

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