Jeff Edwards

Many organizations that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) aren't doing the best job tracking their AWS resource usage and spending– they just pay the monthly bill from Amazon. Unless that bill significantly increases, they have no incentive to determine if they’re really using all those resources or if they’re being accurately billed. But they should be— many companies pay an average of 36% more for cloud services than they need to, according to one report.

Last month, we released WhatsUp Gold 2019.1, and with it, the addition of a powerful REST API that lets you easily integrate other systems or your own scripts with WUG.

With the new REST API, you can now use an extensive range of REST API calls to get data from WhatsUp Gold from other systems, or input data to WhatsUp Gold or have other systems make changes. The result is a huge range of automation use cases that will help IT teams be faster and more efficient. Example use cases include the ability to automatically put devices in maintenance mode before making changes, the ability to add or remove devices and monitors automatically, and more.

Wouldn't it be great if you could get an automatic alert every time something in your house or car broke, like when a spark plug or fuse failed, or when a light bulb went out? That way you could fix those problems before they caused you any trouble... If only. For most of us, the prospect of such a smart home is still a distant glimmer in the future, but for IT teams (and others) working in a modern enterprise, you can get automatic notifications when parts of your infrastructure fail, and you can fix those failures before they cause problems. How? With the IT swiss army knife/ticketing system known as ServiceNow.

Despite being an essential piece of the Sysadmin toolbox, Network performance management (NPM) can be a bit of a mystery for many IT professionals.

In 2019, cloud computing hasn’t just hit the mainstream, it is the mainstream. In fact, some experts are predicting that upwards of 80% of enterprise workloads will live in the cloud by 2020.

Improper configuration changes to a network—or even just one server on a network—can cause huge issues. They can degrade network performance, shut down key services, and even result in noncompliance with regulatory standards like SOX, PCI, HIPAA and FISMA. And they can compromise network security.

Here’s a familiar refrain in IT media: Today’s corporate networks are much different than they were 10, five, or even two years ago. It’s cliched, but it’s true: Modern IT networks are bigger, messier, and more dynamic than they used to be. For system and network administrators, that means it's now a lot more difficult to keep track of what's connected to your network.

The following is an excerpt from our Network Monitoring blog at whatsupgold.com/blog.

For most IT organizations, network monitoring is an essential tool. Network monitoring tools play an important role in letting IT pros get complete visibility into the status of network devices, systems, and applications, keeping the IT team aware of problems with services, networks, application performance, and more.

Log Management is a hot topic these days, especially in the way it pertains to organizational data security. So in this episode of Defrag This, your host Mark Towler sits down with Jim Cashman to quiz the latter on his sysadmin experience with Log Management.

Monitoring bandwidth usage is a vital aspect of any network management strategy. Bandwidth monitors collect, monitor and analyze network traffic volume by end-point (user), port, interface and protocol (application). This information enables IT Admins to: