"What's Up?" is a pretty common casual greeting in the vernacular, but for an IT administrator those words are loaded since they just as well may mean "What's down?, Why?, and For how long?"
IpSwitch aims to help network admins answer these questions — hopefully, before they're asked — with WhatsUp Gold v11, the newest version of its venerable network monitoring tool. (This version software returns to its original "Gold" moniker, after dropping the "Professional" used in several recent versions).
Voyage of Discovery
The first step in using WhatsUp Gold is to start the wizard-based discovery process, which polls the network looking for active devices and/or services. There are several ways to conduct the discovery, including via SNMP if you have a SNMP-enabled router. Otherwise, you can simply scan specific IP address ranges, limit the scan to just a Windows network (i.e. Network Neighborhood), or import a hosts file that contains all the name and IP address information for your network.
WhatsUp Gold will automatically check devices for network availability by monitoring ICMP (ping) responses regardless of the discovery method used. But you can also choose from a variety of active and passive service and performance counters to monitor specific device functions — say, HTTP or POP3 traffic on a Web or mail server or the CPU utilization of a key system.
Once WhatsUp completes the discovery phase (our scan of a class C subnet with just over a dozen devices took just over a minute), you can view the detected devices in either a list or map view. The latter provides a graphical look at your network which you can customize as needed. For example, you can access a library of descriptive icons to denote devices, and organize them on the map (including dragging and dropping them) to indicate any relationships and dependencies between them.
Don't Just Stand There...
Using WhatsUp Gold to monitor your network doesn't do much good if the information it gleans isn't quickly passed along to a human charged with keeping things running smoothly. Therefore, you can specify what actions Whats Up Gold should take in response to various device events (typically, when one stops responding). The most common type of action is the alert, which can take many forms, from a sound playing or WinPopUp notification window to an e-mail, pager, or SMS message. Helpfully, you can define blackout periods to reduce the likelihood of sending a notification to someone who might be on vacation or otherwise unavailable.
Aside from alerts, WhatsUp Gold actions can also be configured to take steps designed to potentially remedy a problem without human intervention, such as attempting to restart a service, run a script, or launch an application. Because a single action may not always be sufficient, multiple actions can be assigned to a single event, if desired. To simplify the editing of actions, you can group them together into customized "action policies" so that changes to the policy will automatically be reflected on all the devices that use it.
WhatsUp Gold also offers predefined intervals (immediately, along with 2, 5, or 20 minutes) so you can tailor your actions to the duration or severity of an outage. For example, an e-mail alert may be sufficient for a two-minute outage, but after 20 minutes, you may want to make sure an administrator is contacted on his or her mobile phone. If the default intervals aren't sufficient, you can edit them or create your own.
