Review: Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold Premium 12.3

The Premium edition of Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold 12.3, launched in October but with several plug-ins added at regular intervals, helps IT managers to monitor networks and application performance in a package that's designed to be easy to install and manage.

However, configuration can be time consuming depending on how many devices or applications need to be monitored.

Three new plug-ins are now available for use in version 12.3, the first being WhatsUp Gold VoIP Monitor, which was launched before the 12.3 upgrade last June. This allows users with Cisco hardware running its Internetwork Operating System to use the IP service level agreement feature to assess a network's suitability to run VoIP, or to measure VoIP performance.

The plug-in provides mean opinion scoring (MOS), calculated planning impairment factor quality scoring as well as measurements of latency, jitter and packet loss. MOS threshold alerts are provided through an active Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) monitor.

The other two plug-ins are NetFlow Monitor, launched in October to take advantage of routing and traffic flow information provided by NetFlow-enabled network hardware, and a layer 2 topology WhatsConnected plug-in launched in December.

WhatsConnected takes layer 2 and layer 3 and can help IT managers visualise device connectivity down to port level, and then integrate that information with the main WhatsUp Gold package.

Version 12.3 now supports Windows Server 2008, Vista Ultimate and Vista Business. Vista can be used as a Windows management instrumentation monitored operating system, and as the actual monitoring workstation itself.

We installed the package on systems running Windows XP Professional and SQL Server, which took up the majority of the time. Customers can use the standard SQL Server Express or choose to connect to a running SQL Server database instance. We chose the Express install and within 10 minutes we could specify IP subnet ranges for the package to pick up the devices connected on our Labs test subnet.

Users can set up a web server to access WhatsUp Gold remotely, but we chose to access the device through a LogMeIn Pro service.

After opening firewall ports for specific protocols, and making sure that SNMP was running on workstations and other network hardware, we could use the 'discover devices' option to poll and discover our network devices. It correctly picked up our switches, servers, network-attached storage (NAS) device, wireless firewall router and wireless access point using a standard IP range scan. There are options to use an SNMP Smartscan, Network Neighbourhood scan or to import the local area network manager (LMhosts) file, which gives name resolution of the Windows NetBIOS host names to IP addresses.

After discovering all our devices, we could then set up the device dependencies and have alerts via email if devices go down or if specific parameters are out of defined bounds. Pager and SMS alerts can also be generated if a modem is connected.

Clicking on a device brings up a dialogue allowing users to add performance monitors, active monitors or passive monitors. Performance monitors can be set using Active Scripts, SNMP or Windows management instrumentation. If a large number of alert conditions need to be monitored, this could require setting up a lot of monitors, although WhatsUp Gold is charged per network device, not for the number of monitors.

The alternative would be to deploy an expert in Active Scripting with the ability to write Visual Basic or Java scripts.

Active monitors are used to query network events occurring on devices, like interface status for switch ports. Passive monitors can be used to monitor SNMP traps, syslog messages or Windows events. For example, an anti-virus program writing to syslog might only be picked up by a passive monitor checking the Windows event log.

For instance, we could create a performance monitor to check disk space remaining on our NAS device, or system memory usage on our 64-bit Windows Server 2008 system. We could also set up an active monitor to check switch connectivity from selected ports on our Zyxel ES-3148 switch. However, manually trawling through the myriad monitors that can be set up to test for system problems is not a trivial task.

After discovery it is possible to set actions if defined attributes go over or under defined thresholds. For instance, it was simple to set up an SMTP server to send an email if critical state changes to important network hardware or servers occurs. Some devices, however, can take time to settle down and could send too many emails if monitors and actions are not properly configured.

The new WhatsConnected plug-in runs through an easily traversable wizard. Users are first asked to name the discovery method they wish to use, and then what kind of sweep to use - an address resolution protocol cache sweep or a standard ping.

After this a seed IP scope can be entered, and there are options to add or exclude different IP subnets. Once the network has been discovered and connectivity automatically generated, this topology can be imported back into WhatsUp Gold, shortcutting the need to connect devices to each other manually.

Overall, WhatsUp Gold 12.3 is a good monitoring and troubleshooting program which, aside from the odd minor glitch, performed admirably, although it faces a lot of competition in the network monitoring market.

Apart from the Standard and Premium editions, there are also Distributed and managed service provider packages. The Standard and Premium versions are priced at £3,013 + VAT and £4,188 + VAT respectively, for monitoring 500 devices.