Typically, a network monitoring platform looks at the bigger problems and ways to fix them. Effectively scrutinizing the nuances of day-to-day network operations is beyond the purview of most solutions. That only narrows the scope of their work and blindfolds enterprises to smaller potentially disruptive problems. At the Networking Field Day event in May, PathSolutions Inc. presented TotalView v12, a network monitoring tool that goes beyond usual monitoring to hunt for hidden problems in the network saving network engineers tens of hours on root-cause analysis.
There Are Fist-Size Holes in Traditional Monitoring
For the most part of their existence, network monitoring solutions have been stuck at picking up information and passing them along half-baked. When a solution only tells a network engineer about a problem without drilling down on the nitty gritty, the job of troubleshooting becomes twice as hard and time-consuming. What most solutions seem unable to do is tap into the reserves of information that the equipment in the network already have and interpret them in real-time so that engineers don’t have to spend their working hours finding needles in a haystack.
When providers talk about network monitoring and network visibility, they tend to blissfully overlook the part that visibility is more than security, troubleshooting and capacity planning. It is equally integral to understanding, operation and management of the elements that reside in the network. The way network is looked at must change so that providers can build solutions that provide NetOps people with more answers than problems.
Accelerated Troubleshooting Is Only Possible with Deep Network Awareness
It is only by proactively solving problems that operators can ensure a consistently performant network around the clock and all-round visibility is key to that. What PathSolutions set out to achieve when it was founded in 2007 was to advance from traditional network monitoring to proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. At the root, the goal was to build a solution that is fully aware of the infrastructure it is monitoring. So it built TotalView, a solution whose job it is to generate reports on network health in clean, digestible format so that NetOps teams can stay on top of issues big and small that can potentially cause crashes and outages.
PathSolutions has its eyes set on small and mid-market companies, but bigger enterprises are not entirely outside its audience either. In fact, Tim Titus, CTO points out “Automation of troubleshooting is key to having those large organizations operate”. TotalView v12 is a solution designed keeping in mind that automated monitoring is something all enterprises can use, no matter the size or industry.
Looking at the Network Differently with TotalView 12
At the Networking Field Day event in May that took place in California, Tim Titus, founder of PathSolutions presented TotalView v12. Over the course of the presentation, Titus laid down the context by sharing his own observations and takeaways working as a network engineer for 30 years and talking about what PathSolutions’ vision is with regards to network monitoring. Along the way he described the capabilities of TotalView v12 and its different modules, including its remote troubleshooting solution, RemoteView.
Built to close the gaps that traditional monitoring solutions leave behind, TotalView 12 delivers default visibility into all processes, services, memory and sundry in all the servers in the network. Deployable on a VM in the network, it does not require setting up of servers or databases to run. Upon deployment, it automatically scans the network detecting every switch, router, gateway and firewall in the environment, no configurations required. Additionally, TotalView 12 can also automatically identify interfaces.
In order to make sure that network operators know everything there is to know in the infrastructure, it pulls information from inside the network equipment where it’s stored by default. It picks up telemetry including performance, configuration, QoS, errors, power over ethernet and connections. Being hardware-agnostic, TotalView v12 is able to gather all this information from appliances of any brands and models.
The heuristics engine that is built into TotalView 12 then runs diagnostics based on the information fed into it to identify the problems. All the steps from gathering telemetry to analysis and reporting can happen as fast as within the first hour of deployment, regardless of the network size. By automatically querying, analyzing and reporting the incidents, it keeps the engineers updated of the what, where and how so that they can resolve them before they become a user experience problem.
TotalView v12 includes additional features like diagramming, path and port mapping, servers and cloud services monitoring, configuration automation and management and more at no extra cost.
Final Verdict
It’s not enough to focus on just the bigger things in the network and forget the smaller subservient elements because those too can bring things down just as easily. PathSolutions TotalView 12 offers all-round visibility of the network and its components making sure that every new and existing appliance and interface is watched closely. The painfully long and winding setup and configuration processes of traditional monitoring platforms can be sidestepped with TotalView v12 that not only takes the sting out of the operation by automating configuration but also eliminates errors of manual operations. With its kind of visibility and ready intelligence, management and monitoring of network assets should be a piece of cake.
For more on TotalView v12 and its modules, please check out PathSolutions’ demo presentation from the recent Networking Field Day event.
