A big part of our days are dedicated to talking to network administrators and managers about how WhatsUp Gold can solve their network management problems. Not surprising, I suppose, considering our line of work; but we love the process of working through the list of requirements we’re presented with during these conversations.

For example: Can we cover equipment from multiple vendors? Can we configure alert notification policies? Can we monitor Flow data? Can we monitor servers and system health? Can we perform real-time troubleshooting?

Of course, the answer to all is “Yes we can.” But the fun part of these conversations is finding additional ways, during the course of learning a customer’s requirements, in which they can benefit from WhatsUp Gold’s inclusive capabilities – all of which are designed to make their life and job just a little bit easier.

Well, we’re pleased to say that we’ve finally captured all those requirements in a document. Drawn from many customer conversations as well years of experience, our Network and Systems Monitoring (NSM) Checklist is designed to help network managers better understand what functionality and capabilities they should consider during their NSM solution buying process.

The NSM Checklist answers questions such as:

• What are the must-haves in terms of technical features?
• How about nice-to-haves? What will I need in the future?
• We’ve got the basics covered. What are some advanced technology requirements we should consider?
• What should we consider in terms of management and administration of the system?
• How about usability and workflow? What are the minimal requirements? How about some advanced ones?

If this sounds interesting to you or someone you know – please download a copy of our Network Management Checklist and put it through its paces. And, as always, please let us know what you think. We hope you find it to be a useful and objective tool to use in our NSM evaluation process.