Item: PathSolutions TotalView
Rating: 10
Author: Bryan Mularcik

Overall Satisfaction with TotalView

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our IT Department uses TotalView for Network Monitoring and Troubleshooting. Due to its many features, we are starting to use TotalView to replace other higher-cost tools that we use for similar purposes. It gives us great visibility into the quality of our network performance, down to the switch-port level, and enables us to quickly identify deficiencies in link quality. Also, we can get a look back in time to pull metrics from reports of issues that may have occurred earlier in the day or week.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Probably the best value I have ever seen in a network monitoring product.
Phenomenal customer service and support.
Features galore!

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Faster turnaround on network troubleshooting frees up Administrator time for other efforts.
Significant cost saving is going to allow us to free us some budget, especially after replacing other tools.

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds IP Address Manager, SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer, WhatsUp Gold, ManageEngine OpManager and Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution

TotalView can either completely replace most of these products today, has a limited ability to replace these products today, or has a planned feature add in an upcoming version that will allow us to replace the product in the near future -- all at a much lower cost.

Likelihood to Recommend

We can use TotalView to alert on up/down and link quality metrics easily. We can give our Service Desk custom permissions to view the network diagram and the map tools to quickly see where there is a "red" link, which could indicate a quality issue that we can proactively address. There are also very handy tools that help us to identify router interfaces, which may be accidentally set to half-duplex, or there is a QoS issue that may be impacting voice quality. New features also allow us to push network config to multiple devices. Totalview really excels in giving us the ability to be proactive about network problems, and is now adding features that are allowing us to replace other, more expensive tools.

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