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REVIEW DATE: 23.07.07 |
| By Fahmida Y. Rashid |
Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold Premium
WhatsUp Gold Premium earned a first-place finish for its robust features, strong troubleshooting capabilities and comprehensive reports. Engineers were particularly impressed with its feature set, price/performance and integration capabilities, giving it top marks across those three categories.
Ipswitch launched its most recent version of the product earlier this year. The application offers an intuitive interface and a high level of customization for its features. WhatsUp Gold Premium combines many network-management features and trending databases with extensive packet intelligence, supporting SNMP 1/2/3 and WMI devices.
WhatsUp Gold was simple to install. The AJAX-based Web interface is clean and easy to access. WhatsUp Gold also comes with its own Web server that allows anyone on the network to log in and see how attached devices are performing. This feature allows for remote administration. The interface can be customized in a series of dashboards, providing specific information to different users. The dashboard's customizability is important, as users can determine what content they want to see when they log in. Administrators may be interested only in broad status information while help desk consultants would need specific machine and device details.
WhatsUp Gold categorizes monitoring into three types: active, performance and passive. Active monitoring merely checks if the device or service is running. Performance monitoring looks at utilization levels for CPU, disk, interface and memory, as well as ping latency. Passive monitoring waits for events such as SNMP traps or an entry in a Windows event log.
Engineers asked WhatsUp Gold to scan the network using ping to auto-discover devices within a specified range of IP addresses. Multiple subnets were specified. Engineers also specified to search using all active monitors, including DNS, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP4, ping, POP3, SMTP, Radius, SNMP and Telnet. All the performance monitors were selected. With these parameters, WhatsUp Gold took an hour to auto-discover 11 devices (compared with 5 minutes at most for LANSurveyor and NetCrunch), but the wealth of information gathered made the wait worthwhile. Instead of running the scan with a broad IP range with a lot of vacant addresses, the tool also could have been run several times separately on each subnet to find all the devices.
While engineers set WhatsUp Gold to scan an IP range, it also can auto-discover devices in other ways, such as using IP addresses from a HOSTS file, obtaining data from an SNMP-enabled router, or by looking at computers in the Windows Network Neighborhood. Devices and virtual machines can be added manually by IP address.
WhatsUp Gold correctly detected all the devices and generated a network map. Detected devices can be categorized into groups for a less-cluttered visual map. Engineers particularly liked the pre-programmed views such as showing only Windows devices, devices that are currently down or devices that have no credentials (WMI or SNMP). These views make looking at a large network easier. Solution providers also can customize views to show only machines with high CPU usage or low free hard-drive space. Double-clicking on the device icon pulls up a more detailed information page on the device. Any information WhatsUp Gold couldn't gather can be manually entered.
WhatsUp Gold accesses and communicates with other devices on the network via SNMP and Windows authentication methods. This makes it easy to access both Linux and Windows machines. The application can store a series of different credentials to try, so Test Center engineers didn't have to manually log in to each machine.
The package's alert system is very robust, proactively displaying a pop-up message, sending a text or e-mail message, running an application or playing a sound. The messages can be adjusted based on how critical the problem it is. A device down for 5 minutes may just pop up a message, but if it remains down for 10 minutes, the software may send a text message. However, the alerts are not very granular in detail. Engineers noted that in WhatsUp Gold's world, "down" doesn't always mean "not running." Down refers to whatever threshold is being measured for the alert. In the case of an alert for a server hitting 90 percent CPU utilization for more than 5 minutes, 90 percent utilization is in the down state. If the CPU utilization alert is triggered, WhatsUp Gold records the device as being down even if everything else is running perfectly.
As part of its troubleshooting toolkit, WhatsUp Gold also can automatically restart services such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server if a problem occurs.
WhatsUp Gold comes with more than 50 pre-defined reports and offers hundreds of customizable reports. The reports help identify traffic trends, which is especially important as more and more organizations deploy packet- and bandwidth-sensitive applications such as VoIP. Engineers were able to drill down into network traffic flow to diagnose performance and to examine unauthorized traffic thanks to the extensive packet data captured in the database.
WhatsUp Gold Premium is priced based on the number of monitored devices, from as few as 100 devices to more than 500 devices. The other version, WhatsUp Gold Standard, does not monitor Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server or WMI applications.
There's no fee to join Ipswitch's three-tier partner program, but it requires an annual revenue commitment and technical certification. Ipswitch gives leads to partners and offers pre-sales, post-sales and technical support.
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