Monitoring

IT professionals seek affordable network monitoring solutions. They’re not interested in trusting free tools to do the work*. Nor do they need to pay a lot of money to get what they need.

By the time a network manager at a Midwestern U.S. non-profit organization called us for help, his 5 year-old wireless infrastructure was buckling under BYOD. Employees trying to work during lunch were complaining that their applications were slowing or even failing to operate.

If there’s a problem on your network, it’s likely that the source is within walking distance.

Today we are glad to announce the availability of WhatsUp Gold version 16.2, a new upgrade to our flagship product that provides network, server and application monitoring. It helps make our customers’ jobs a lot easier to do while they work hard to manage and tame networks at companies and government organizations around the world.

Imagine fielding a barrage of support calls from upset college students. Up in arms as they can't access a wireless network. Not long ago, that was the reality for a large university. The help desk was overwhelmed as they tried to manage a network of 2,500 access points. On top of BYOD chaos and students' big appetites for downloads. 

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from Joe, a network administrator from an electronics company that was growing fast. When he started his new job he was surprised to find that the company  used what he called a “primitive” system for communication between the help desk and the IT operations network monitoring team.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from a network administrator at a large electronic invoicing company in Mexico. His company serves large multinational corporations as well as thousands of medium and small clients. His task is to keep Microsoft Exchange up and running at peak performance levels to ensure quick invoice delivery.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from Edgar, a systems administrator at a bank in Northern Europe. Edgar has been at the bank long enough to know the systems inside and out, but his expertise was challenged each time the bank acquired a smaller bank or merged with a rival. The new banks had different systems and plenty of custom applications.    

Servers, networks and applications aren’t the only remote devices that some companies need to manage. Did you know WhatsUp Gold can also monitor point-of-sale devices such as vending machines, in-store video games and ticket turnstiles? In fact, any device that supports ping, SNMP or WMI management protocols.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network management comes to us from a company that’s been in business for eleven decades. They’re a logistics company with offices around the U.S. And they literally started with a horse and a cart. They have bought several companies along the way, keep their eyes on the future, and learned the value of technologies that help them grow.

The IT life was simpler when employees each had one desktop computer and one landline phone. Technology did not move. It was stationary. Nowadays we have laptops, smart phones, and tablets that are both mobile and connected. And they have no wires. You are told that applications are mission critical,  expected to be accessible by people at a speed that optimizes productivity, and available to people inside and outside the organization. And who else wants access all the time? Hackers and other online criminals. As if you had enough to worry about.

Network Monitoring tools are a must-have for organizations of all sizes. When evaluating solutions focus is often placed on comparing features and ease of use, but understanding the total cost of ownership is very important. The core licensing structure, whether it is device-based, port- or interface-based, or measurement-based, can have a big impact on license costs up front and the administrative workload for maintaining the solution in production over the lifetime of the product.

We are pleased to announce that WhatsUp Gold won Silver in the 2013 Redmond Reader’s Choice Awards Best of the Best for General Network Monitoring Tool.

In my current role I speak to a lot of network engineers trying to automatically map their network topology. Actually it’s more than that, they don’t just want to discover devices, the want a port level diagram of exactly how all their switches, routers, servers, workstations, phones, firewalls . . . you get the point. Some engineers I speak to practically ask:

In the words of Victor Kennedy, Director of Talladega County 9-1-1, “Networks don’t get more mission-critical than emergency communications.”

Other's have already done it for you?

Here is a useful list of tips that network administrators can leverage in their everyday travails.

Network Monitoring comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be as complex as a multi-site WAN distributed solution. Or, it could be as simple as reacting to end-users phone calls claiming that they can’t receive email.