If you’re a college student at heart, then you will love Ipswitch’s upcoming toolkit release. Remember scrounging around for a free meal or giveaways at your alma mater? I certainly do.

The release of WhatsUp Gold Engineer’s Toolkit allows you to exercise the young adult within you once again, while providing much more substantial value. Normally a $995 product, the toolkit will be offered for free as a limited-time promotion.

It is comprised of the most useful tools meshed together with a consistent look and feel for an easy-to-use/learn interface. Unlike the Solarwinds and Manage Engine toolkits, the WUG Engineer’s Toolkit offers an array of tools organized into “most used tools” categories that are controlled from a single user interface:

• Design
• Discovery
• Diagnostics
• DNS Verification
• Remote Control
• Configuration
• Credentials Management

The tools operate off of one credential library, so the user only has to enter device credentials once.

Keep a look out for this freebie the end of June at the CiscoLive! event in Las Vegas. If you want a heads-up you can sign up for advanced notification from WUG.

You can check out some of the toolkit’s functionality here: http://www.brainshark.com/brainshark/vu/view.asp?pi=zGGzPItCozn6Yz0

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: