We are now on Day 5 of the new decade.  Feel any different now that it’s 2010? No? Me neither.

But I’ll tell you what. I was prepared to feel different and in this preparation I did what most people do around the year-end; I reflected back on 2009.

Now personally, not a whole lot has changed. My hair is a few inches longer. I’ve acquired a few new gadgets (my favorite being my Kindle and my Zoom H4n portable recorder). But I’m basically the same the person, for better or worse, I was at the start of 2009.

WhatsUp Gold, however, is not the same Network Management solution it was 12 months ago. After giving all of 3-minutes pause to ponder my personal growth – or lack thereof as the case may be – I started to think about the enhancements that were made to WUG in past year.

I began trying to tick off as many advancements as I could without consulting this last year’s impressive catalogue of release notes. Then I thought I’d make it a game.  I’ll list what I came up with and if you see I’m missing anything, anything at all, comment at the end of this blog and I’ll send you a t-shirt and a ninja (not a real ninja . . . but one of these).

And by the way . . . 2009′s explosion of features will appear paltry by 2010′s end. Stay tuned . . . we have some more tricks up our sleeves in the months to come . . .

Here goes:

WhatsUp Gold v12.4

• Mobile Interface (this was so awesome, we made a video about it)
• SNMPv3 Discovery
• SNMPv3 Traps
• Device Status Workspace report (who could forget about this? It gives a snapshot of a device including all of the groups to which it belongs.)
• Group Status workspace reports. This shows a view similar to the Summary Counts workspace report, but only for the devices in the selected group.
• Support for Custom Performance Monitors in bulk field change.

WhatsUp Gold v14

• The introduction of our Alert Center allowing users the ability to alert on performance data as well as configure thresholds that alert on performance, passive, Flow Monitor and system data.
• Additional support for defining a specific polling order for a device’s active monitors using Critical Active Monitors aka intra-device dependencies. Translation: no more alert storms!
• WhatsUp Gold v14 Premium Edition saw the inclusion of several new active monitors including: APC UPS, Exchange, Fan, File Properties, Folder, FTP, HTTP Content, Printer, Process, Power Supply, Network Statistics, Microsoft SQL and MySQL Query, Temperature.
• Several new actions including, SNMP Set Action, Windows Event Log Action, Text Log Action
• Integrated a new percent variable picker for use in the Windows Event Log and Text Log actions.
• Added new find device feature to search for WhatsUp Gold managed devices.
• Added support for Cisco and Juniper Netscreen CPU and Memory Performance Monitors.
• Added an Argument column to the Device Properties – Active Monitors, Device Properties – Polling > Up and Down Dependencies, and Critical Monitor dialogs to help differentiate network interface instances.
• Added support for 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista, and Windows 2008 Server.
• Added support for MS SQL Server 2008 Standard or Enterprise Edition.
• Added support for VmWare ESXi 3.0 or later.
• Added support for Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.
• Added support for ADO credential types in the Credentials Library.

Flow Monitor 2.0

• Changed the name from Netflow Monitor to Flow Monitor to reflect its added capability to monitor J-flow, S-flow and Netflow data.
• Added Flow Monitor reports: including Interface Usage, ICMP Type workspace report and Packet Size Distribution workspace report.
• Added improved Flow Monitor report configuration to allow fields in the Top Sender and Receiver workspace reports to sort by Bytes, Packets, Flows.

WhatsUp Gold 14.1

• Ability to export reports to PDF – no more translating ugly text files to your boss.
• New active monitor- the Wireless Access Point Radio Monitor
• Support for Cisco Aironet Wireless Access Points (WAPs) monitoring in WhatsUp Gold Premium, Distributed, and MSP Editions.
• New Workspace Reports including: Wireless Active Clients, Wireless Details, Wireless Errors, Wireless Last 10 Syslog Messages.

WhatsConfigured

• Provide ability to automate device configuration, device configuration backup and restore capabilities, and administer change management for network devices. (You don’t want follow in Bing’s footsteps and learn the importance of NCCM the hard way!)

Flow Publisher

• Turn on network traffic analysis for every device and every network segment – without a costly upgrade!
• Determine which users, applications or traffic sources are consuming bandwidth.
• Real-time alerts when monitored traffic parameters breach targeted thresholds.
• Access to over 40+ web and mobile reports for base-lining and analysis

And while you scramble to find the features I’ve missed so that you may collect what will be rightfully yours (remember the T-Shirt and Ninja I promised those smart few in the beginning of this post?) I will leave you with this:

Behold the Google Phone. Finally. 2010 will see a true competitor to the iPhone.

Oh yeah. And WhatsUp Gold started a pretty sweet community site this year. Check it out if you haven’t already!