In July of this year, Enterprise Management Associates published a landscape review entitled EMA Enterprise Network Availability Monitoring Systems (ENAMS) Radar Report 2014. A blog post written by my colleague Jim Frey on the EMA site reviews the scope and objectives of the report. The study covered Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold version 16, along with sixteen other ENAMS from fifteen other vendors.
In EMA’s view, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold is a well-known, established product with a history that spans more than two decades and that has been especially popular among the small-medium enterprises. Over the past several years, Ipswitch has substantially enhanced the WhatsUp Gold solution suite to address an expanded range of network management functions including flow monitoring, configuration, mapping, and IP address management. And while Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold remains at its core a network management solution, the broader suite now covers other managed domains as well, including virtual servers, VoIP, logs, and application monitoring.
Some of the areas where Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold stood out among its peers within our study included:
- Single pane of glass – This is especially critical in small/medium enterprise environments where less is more. Network managers need one “go to” screen that provides information on the current state of the network and alerts them to problems before they reach critical mass. Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold has been designed to do this by bringing together a broad range of management information into intuitive, informative consoles and dashboards.
- Customizable dashboards –The expansion of Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold to support monitoring of other IT domains makes it an ideal cross team monitoring platform – a point validated by our conversations with current Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold users during the course of our study. When a product is being used for cross platform monitoring, it becomes necessary to be able to create custom views for various teams, such as server administrators or VoIP managers versus network operators. Within Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, dashboards can be easily defined and adjusted to meet the individual needs of technical and non-technical personnel. WhatsUp Gold users called this out specifically as being a capability that they found to be highly valuable.
- Cost advantage – EMA analysis indicated that Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold product licensing and maintenance costs are very competitive, particularly as smaller managed environments grow. The simplicity of the Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold licensing model contributes favorably towards keeping costs scalable.
While the ENAMS market sector must be considered mature, that does not mean the technology is any less relevant today than it was ten or twenty years ago. If anything, the criticality of the network as part of the core business infrastructure has made network health an imperative across organizations of all sizes.
Small/medium enterprises are growing at a much faster rate than their large enterprise counterparts, and need solid, cost-effective choices for network management that fit between “free” open source tools at one end of the spectrum complex and costly full blown enterprise solutions at the other end. Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold has been designed specifically for this purpose.
-- Guest blog by Tracy Corbo, Principal Research Analyst, Enterprise Management Associates