Tag: Network Monitoring

“Sorry we are currently experiencing server issues. We hope to be back up and recovered shortly.” -- @wa_status

WhatsUp Gold software products have recently been certified under the Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme (CCEVS). (see today's announcement for more details).

When the IT Administrator at an Italian manufacturing company started his job, the IT team was manually monitoring the network on a problem-by-problem basis. It was a understandable drain on resources. And was also affecting the quality of service provided to their business users.

Two regional auto parts companies merged to increase their competitiveness with national chains. But they almost immediately ran into an unexpected network monitoring problem. The IT manager tasked with consolidating the two companies’ network infrastructures found that neither company’s network monitoring products had Layer 2 and Layer 3 discovery capabilities. This would give them enough detail to determine what devices to keep and which to upgrade and force them to spend more than they had budgeted for the project.

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.

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.

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.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind for the Network Management division as we launched v16. We finally have a chance to look back on all we’ve accomplished – including a fantastic PC Magazine review.

There is a common misconception that BYOD will be the savior of IT budget troubles; however, it’s not always as cost-effective as it seems. According to Aberdeen, enterprises spend an extra $170,000 per year to deploy 1,000 mobile devices via BYOD. A typical BYOD model costs 33% more than the traditional corporate-wireless model.

When I talk about BYOD with other IT pros, I get flashbacks of 2009 when the ‘cloud’ first became a hot topic. Security and costs are the top concerns, but few people understand the importance of monitoring and measuring the impact on the network, and why it matters.

Hey folks, this is Brian M. Jacobs, Senior Product Manager for the WhatsUp Gold family of network management products.  I would like to let you know that a security researcher (who has been a big fan of WhatsUp Gold for many years) has informed us of a SQL injection vulnerability in the WhatsUp Gold v15.0.2 product.  This vulnerability involves WhatsUp Gold running in a default deployment, in which administrators have privileged access to the database instance.  For customers who wish to restrict access to their database, we already provide the capability to configure WhatsUp Gold to run with reduced database privileges.  Details on how to implement reduced privilege operation can be found in our Database Migration and Management Guide.  Based on our customers' input, we are also working on security patches to limit all SQL injection related vulnerabilities, regardless of database privilege level.

As a product manager of an integrated solution suite, it’s interesting to compare and contrast the similarities and differences between traditional systems management (OS deployment, inventory, software delivery, patching, monitoring) and its major trends (security, virtualization, cloud, efficient data centers) with network management (deployment and configuration, backup/restore, monitoring, traffic analysis, Quality of Service) and networking trends (mobile devices, cloud, virtualization, larger networking demands). There are many similarities between these two IT focus areas and I will “blog” about several aspects as I tie-in and compare systems management with network management over the next year. One similarity that is particularly easy to spot and “leaps off the page” for me relates to discovery. In fact, it ALL starts with discovery.