SolarWinds is one of the market leaders on network monitoring, but can be overwhelming to configure and use for many organizations unless they have a full-time employee dedicated to its operation. As a result, many organizations only use it to detect outages and get some utilization graphs on WAN links.
Features that TotalView has that SolarWinds does not:
- Total Network Visibility – You’re responsible for the entire network, TotalView shows you everything upon initial deployment. It would take many months of effort to achieve this with SolarWinds.
- Deep Knowledge – TotalView automatically collects configuration, performance, 19 error counters, PoE, STP, as well as connectedness on every interface of the network. This means that TotalView knows more about your network than SolarWinds and can thus find more problems.
- Heuristics Engine – TotalView analyzes this information to produce plain-English root-cause answers to problems: “This interface has a cabling fault”.
- Predictive Analysis – Because TotalView has more information, it can see what’s going to happen and alert you of problems that SolarWinds can’t.
- Proactive Issue Resolution – What if you knew what your equipment knows? You could solve problems before users complain. That’s core to TotalView’s operation.
- Path Mapping – TotalView can show you every link, switch, router, and firewall used to connect any two IP addresses across the network. This speeds troubleshooting by making it easy to see what happened at any point in time between two devices.
- PoE Monitoring – TotalView automatically monitors PoE power at the switch and interface level.
- STP Monitoring – Every interface is monitored for STP status and root-bridge information. If anything changes, you’ll be made aware of this.
- Scalability & Server Footprint – SolarWinds typically requires multiple servers (Master collector, remote collectors, Netflow server, database server). TotalView has far better scalability as you only need one server to support monitoring networks over 100,000 interfaces.
- Reliability & Performance – SolarWinds occasionally has problems where it disconnects from the database, or database queries can be slow. This isn’t a problem with TotalView since its architecture is designed for better performance.
All of the above features are included in the TotalView core package for no additional charge.
Additionally, TotalView has modules for:
- SecOps: SOAR, SIEM integration, Attack Surface monitoring, Network Detection & Response
- Telecom: Call simulation, phone locator, MOS monitoring and alerting, IP-SLA monitoring, SIP-Trunk monitoring
- Remote Worker Monitoring & Troubleshooting: Remote user performance, Zoom/Teams/WebEx call simulation & troubleshooting
