Ever wonder how other IT professionals use WhatsUp Gold?

Marston’s, Britain’s largest brewer of cask beer, has a cool use-case story. The brewers were interested in growing their business to become known for more than great beer and pubs. They wanted their evolving clientele to know them for also providing a fun public WiFi hotspot and the place to play the latest internet-connect gaming products.

In order to do this they needed to not only enhance both front of house and back-office infrastructure but also improve communications and reliability of connection between the individual pubs and head office so they could start offering these new services to clients.

To achieve this, Marston’s took on the ambitious and innovative step of moving into the telecoms industry in its own right, allowing it to package and deploy its own customized services to various parts of the business.

But creating its own broadband network and taking responsibility for the infrastructure of its 500+ managed pubs meant that Marston’s needed to invest in a scalable networking monitoring solution to provide visibility across the new telecoms network and to help identify problems with hardware and connectivity.

Luckily, their partner, Level 8 Solutions, stepped in and recommended Ipswitch’s WhatsUp Gold.

This wasn’t Marston’s first experience with WhatsUp Gold. They’d been using within their head office for several years. They then deployed a separate WhatsUp Gold installation to monitor routers and WiFi hotspots installed at its managed pubs, as well as to support home workers also served by Marston’s Telecom.

“Using Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, we are able to monitor the remote infrastructure installed at our estate of managed pubs across the country, ensuring that equipment is functioning correctly and that the connectivity we are providing through Marston’s Telecom is also performing as expected,” McMinn explained.

Plus sides to using WhatsUp Gold over other products like HP Insight were WhatsUp Gold’s clear and easy to follow feedback on the state of the network and the devices connected to it; its single point of view over the health of the network being monitored; and the clear visual guidance when a device encounters a problem.

As in . . . Green is Good, Red is Bad.

If you’re interested in reading the full Case Study click here.

So what about you? Do you use WhatsUp Gold to monitor something even more interesting that beer? If you do, let us know about it in the comments!

As technology evolves so does the ability for people to hack it.

Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold is staying ahead of the game with its versatile network traffic analyzer, Flow Monitor.

Did you know it’s rarely an apocalyptic hack, like the ones depicted in SyFy films, of which businesses should be weary? Instead – according to a recent report on the Black Hat Briefings by SearchSecurity.com- – it’s the persistent, targeted attacks that weaken a company’s IT infrastructure and compromise its business.

SearchSecurity.com reported last week on two researchers who demonstrated examples of hacks at the Black Hate Briefings. The duo’s hacks ranged from zero-day PDF attacks to memory-based rootkits.

The presenters, Nick Percoco, senior VP at Trustwave’s SpiderLabs and Trustwave senior forensic investigator Jibran Ilyas pointed out what WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor customers already know:

That attackers are hiding in plain sight and that they are moving data out of organizations using tried-and-true means, such as FTP, HTTP and SMTP.

Firewalls are of little use in these situations. They won’t flag HTTP traffic as an anomaly.

What you need is the ability to monitor traffic moving over TCP port 31337. WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor, in conjunction with Alert Center, provides this ability and alerts users in real-time when a security breach happens.

In addition, the new release of WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor allows users to set up monitors on multiple TCP ports (80.8080, etc) so by setting up an alarm specifically for port 31377, you can monitor in real-time and detect the kinds of attacks that Black Hat is reporting.

For the full article click here.

To download a free trial of Flow Monitor click here.

Software should make your life simpler.

That’s been the mantra of our WhatsUp Gold developers from year one, nearly 20 years ago.Today, this dilegence and commitment to our customers was vindicated by NetworkManagementSoftware scribe, Aaron Leskiw.

Leskiw conducted an in-depth review of WhatsUp Gold Premium, focusing on the usability and simplicity of the product in relation to the robust feature set that it delivers.

Leskiw’s bottom line on the review of WhatsUp Gold Premium Edition was: “The big question is: Does WhatsUp Gold deliver on its promise of making your job easier? Yes it does – and very well! All of the features tested performed superbly and the software was simple to install.

Share in our success (afterall, it’s with your feedback that we’ve successfully developed our user-friendly IT Managemetn solution!) and check out the full review here: http://www.networkmanagementsoftware.com/whatsup-gold-premium-review

Check out the full review here: http://www.networkmanagementsoftware.com/whatsup-gold-premium-review

A recent review of WhatsUp Gold Premium Edition from Aaron Leskiw on networkmanagementsoftware.com poses the question: Does network management have to be complicated?

Obviously, we think it should be just the opposite, and build our network management solutions with the goal of making the life of a network administrator that much easier. Leskiw conducted a pretty in-depth review of WhatsUp Gold Premium, focusing on the usability and simplicity of the product in relation to the robust feature set that it delivers.

The bottom line on the review of WhatsUp Gold Premium Edition? Well Leskiw had this to say: “The big question is: Does WhatsUp Gold deliver on its promise of making your job easier? Yes it does – and very well! All of the features tested performed superbly and the software was simple to install.

Check out the full review here: http://www.networkmanagementsoftware.com/whatsup-gold-premium-review

I had a few free hours yesterday afternoon inbetween Sunday obligations so I did what many people do when blessed with extra time; I powered on my gaming console and sank into my couch for a quick game or two.

I’ve been trying to wean myself from my “Little Big Planet” so I thought I’d download “Heavy Rain,” just to see what all the hype was about.

Unfortunately for me my gaming console of choice is PlayStation 3. (Don’t think I don’t hear you Xbox fanatics chuckling to yourselves that owning a PS3 is indeed unfortunate, but let’s save that argument for another post.)

Instead of “Heavy Rain,” I received this message:

8001050F Registration of the trophy information could not be completed. The game will now quit.

I tried three more times before I broke out my computer and did a quick Google search to see what the heck was going on. It didn’t take long for me to find other users experiencing the same frustration.

It was official; the PlayStation Network was down.  Bummer.

And the outage seemed to be only effecting the older versions of PS3. Meaning Double Bummer for me. I don’t yet own one those new “slim” PS3 models.

Sony acknowledged the technical issue on their blog Sunday night and said it was working on a fix.

“We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and genuinely appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this,” Sony social media manager Jeff Rubenstein posted on the PlayStation blog.

I wondered what, if anything, they use to monitor their network. I wondered if they had deployed WhatsUp Gold on the PS3 network whether or not I’d be sitting on my couch wondering what to do now.

I can’t help it. It’s the first thing I think about in these situations. I thought about the flood of phone calls those in charge of PSN must be drowning in at that moment.

In this world where nearly everything happens online Network management software is no longer a Nice to Have. It is definitely a Need to Have.

If PSN does not have a Network Management solution in place I’m willing to bet they will have one in the very near future.

In the meantime they’ve released that the source of the problem has been identified as a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system. Sony says it hopes to resolve the issue in the next 24 hours.

If you, like me, own an older PS3, Sony advises we keep our consoles turned off until further notice.

An ordinary day for a network administrator can tend to be anything but. Whether you’re dealing with help-desk tickets, installing new applications into the infrastructure or troubleshooting a network outage, there never seems to be a shortage of tasks on your daily to do list.

One of the more important aspects of your job, when it relates to maintaining optimum network performance, is managing network device configurations and changes within those devices. The fact is, device configurations are the key to a properly functioning network, and when changes go unnoticed, or devices fail, the impact felt across the network can be detrimental to business operations.

Obviously, with the level of importance of maintaining network device configurations being so high, there are some related tasks that are necessary to keep your infrastructure up and running at its peak at all times. Backing up configuration files in the event you need to restore or replace any failed devices rapidly, limiting the impact felt by the network, is vital. Also, when changes are made to device configurations, it’s important to compare running files to stored files in order to speed up operational response.

Those are just a few of the main tasks that are necessary to complete in order to gain complete control over your device configurations. The fact is, this is not a simple aspect of network management to maintain, especially if you are tasked with conducting these jobs manually.

We at WhatsUp Gold realize the stresses you have to face daily, and try to do what we can to make life for you that much easier. When it comes to  Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM), WhatsUp Gold WhatsConfigured offers you peace of mind by automating the critical tasks necessary to maintaining your device configurations around the clock.

Don’t take my word for it though, listen to Rachel Kennedy, Senior Information Developer in the Ipswitch network management division, for a full description of WhatsConfigured’s command line:

Is That Barbie in the Server Room?

It’s official folks. Being a geek is, without a doubt, chic. Even Barbie’s doing it!

Mattel announced last week that Barbie’s 125th career would be that of a computer engineer. Girl’s come a long way since her days as a secretary hasn’t she?

Barbie’s latest foray into the working world was determined by an online vote – Mattel’s first. A profession in high tech beat out equally progessive occupations such as Architect, Environmentalist, news anchor and surgeon.

Imagine that. After all the years tech enthusiasts have logged being pegged as “computer nerds” and a busty blonde plastic mold comes along and makes it trendy.

I wonder if her “Interests” would include long walks in the server room and magic gatherings. But I digress . . .

Join Our 14.2 and WhatsVirtual TTP

Ipswitch’s network management division takes pride in developing software that keeps our users on the cutting edge of industry standards. You need a network management solution that will continue to evolve as the industry evolves.

The latest product we’ve been developing, WhatsVirtual, is an answer to the growing industry trend toward virtualization. It is now essential for IT professionals to have a tool that allows them to effectively monitor and manage their virtualized environments.

Join our WhatsVirtual Technical Preview Program and be the first to give us feedback on this new tool. We view our TPP participants as an integral part of WhatsUp Gold’s product developement.
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The success of WhatsUp Gold’s Traffic Analysis tool late last year was without doubt due in part to your feedback and participation in our Flow Publisher TPP.

Flow Publisher is a lightweight complement to WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor (Flow Monitor provides detailed insight into how your network bandwidth is utilized by collecting NetFlow, sFlow and J-Flow data) designed for those networks that don’t support flow data.

So cross Budget For Costly Upgrades and New Hardware off your To Do List: Flow Publisher; enables flow monitoring for every network segment and for every device whether or not they natively support flow monitoring. Flow Publisher captures raw network traffic and converts it into standard NetFlow records.

Here’s a quick 101 of network traffic analysis terms you should be familiar with in order to effectively get a handle on your network’s performance

* Top Offenders: The top offenders are those users, applications or hosts that are consuming your network bandwidth.
* BitTorrent: This is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data, which allows large files to be downloaded without affecting the performance of the network.
* WAN Data Traffic: This refers to traffic slowing down the performance of the wireless environments, usually consisting of FTP or copying files between sites.
* Security: Proper network traffic and performance monitoring allows you to detect DOS attacks and other rogue activity directed at your network.

I recently joined Ipswitch in marketing after a hiatus from the enterprise networking space. I come back to find some significant changes and some things that seem to never change.

The things that have changed:

- more devices
- more bandwidth
- enterprise VoIP has arrived (finally)
- firewalls
- 802.11 wireless
- software licensing
- less documentation

Things that have not changed:

- stressed out Network Administrators
- understaffing (do more with less)
- more devices
- software bloat
- incompatible systems
- software licensing
- lack of documentation

Several things have occurred to me over the past few weeks and now even more than ever, is the expectation that the network is a utility and like heat and power and is just expected to work. So heavy is the reliance on network infrastructure, that most companies literally shut down when access to servers and the Internet has been compromised. Reactive management of networks is no longer acceptable and given that a network management professional’s job is at stake every time there is an issue, pro-active or predictive management of this critical asset is essential.

How many network administrators have internal SLAs that they are measured against for services up-time? I’d be interested in hearing from the folks in the trenches about their experiences and how they meet these expectations.

I’ll dig into some of the above changes and not changes over the next few weeks.