Cost-effective network management

By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 05/06/02

How much do you expect to spend on network management tools? $50,000? $100,000? These are the sort of figures that usually are quoted for serious network management software, yet, as many people will attest, getting your money's worth out of such an investment can be difficult.

This is because the top-end suites are huge! Not only is the implementation time-consuming, the ambitious scale of many suites is far beyond what network managers really need.

The above is all to introduce a tool we've just had some serious fun with called WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch (www.ipswitch.com).

WhatsUp Gold (nope, there is no silver or bronze) is a network management tool that includes active discovery of devices and device identification, monitoring of services by TCP and User Datagram Protocol (UDP), SNMP trap monitoring, multiple interface support, customizable Web interface, dependency checking, text-to-speech notification and extensive reporting. And all this for $800.

It can do pretty much everything you need in the way of network management short of the exotica offered by the big boys' tools (which many of you tell me you aren't overpleased with anyway).

So what is WhatsUp Gold all about? It can be installed on any version of Windows greater than 95, and it is a simple and painless process. The manual is well-written and comprehensive (and as intrinsically dull as only a good manual can be).

Once it is up and running you can create a new network map by adding devices individually or using the autodiscovery feature. The latter populates the map by surveying your network using SNMP, Internet Control Message Protocol, your Windows Network Neighborhood, local Windows registry entries and local "hosts" file, and by TCP/UDP searches for specific services (such as HTTP and FTP).

You can add optional links between devices and links for passive devices such as hubs. Then, voil�, you are ready to roll.

Another neat feature is the ability to define a device and then use the built-in traceroute service to create a map of all the hops leading to it. Way cool. You can also set WhatsUp Gold to poll the devices in the map on a schedule, and automatically discover new devices as they appear.

In display and edit mode, devices are shaped and color-coded according to their status (in keeping with the overall configurability of the product's interface, you can change the colors and icons as you please).

Other views of the network include a detailed list of the statistics of each device, a log of outstanding notifications (every device can have notifications associated with going down, coming up, response thresholds, SNMP traps and so on) or a status display.

This latter display raises one of my few complaints about the product: It is amazingly ugly and full of grunged, truncated text. A minor issue nonetheless.

You can set notifications to occur by sounds ("oh-gah, oh-gah" for example), e-mail, pager, beeper, Winpopup or voice-to-text (in our office we now have a sepulchral, godlike voice announcing major status changes that seems to get serious attention from the slaves who man the networks here).

Another view is dependencies - you can define one device as being dependent on another so the dependent device is polled only if the "superior" device fails to respond. For complex networks this significantly reduces the polling traffic and the polling interval that can be used.

What we really liked was the Web interface. WhatsUp Gold has a built-in Web server (with a configurable port) and a templating system that you can change to create custom management views and reports. The templates are based on a simple scripting language that includes conditionals and loops.

If you try out or buy the product make sure you look at the custom Web templates on the Ipswitch site - they are for Internet Explorer clients only but far nicer to use.

We could go on at length about this product but you really need to try it out. It is robust, flexible, customizable and fast - an excellent value for the money. Much better than spending $50,000, eh? We award WhatsUp Gold nine gearteeth out of 10.