Bang for the buck

In an industry laden with complex management products that take a long time to deploy, it's refreshing to look at less-expensive alternatives.

Large network management vendors continue to direct tremendous innovation toward automating management tasks, increasing the intelligence of management products at the vendor's - not the user's - expense, and shortening deployment cycles. But few products in the industry today are likely to beat the return on investment you can get with WhatsUp Gold.

There are two reasons for this - one of which is a stunner. The first reason is that WhatsUp Gold is a considered approach to alarm management and performance management that can be deployed in a matter of days by a network administrator. The second (the stunner) is that WhatsUp Gold costs only $800, or $1,090 if you include services. Anyone familiar with the usual costs of network management software knows that this is roughly two zeros light.

It's important to stress that WhatsUp Gold isn't, and doesn't try to be, anything miraculous. To some degree, that's how it has achieved a growth rate of 40% year over year for the last three years. With installations that begin at the high end of the small-business market (100 users and up), WhatsUp Gold has nevertheless succeeded among a wide number of enterprises - from utilities, to manufacturers, to businesses in the health industry. It is popular among an increasing range of service providers, as well, where it is being pressured to deliver on increased refinement for point-of-presence reports. Among its users, managed devices (routers, hubs, servers) can tally as high as 750, with 300 to 500 being the more normal large-scale use. WhatsUp Gold has a 1,000-device limit per copy.

About a year-and-a-half ago I wrote a column on WhatsUp Gold - and was struck with its breadth of function for the price. Since then, the breadth of function has gotten substantially better. The product includes performance information (threshold, basic synthetic response) - and can track IP services, some applications, and Web-transaction response. This enhances its core focus, which has been availability-alarm management.

At the end of January, Ipswitch introduced WhatsUp Gold 6.0, which includes logical (Layer 3) autodiscovery and mapping, with drawing tools to represent physical connections. Administrators can select the icons they want to manage, so customization is fairly simple. Not surprisingly, the chief advantage of the maps is to enable easier viewing of alarm conditions and more effective fault isolation.

Also new with Version 6.0 is a Log Manager function with search capability for events based on basic information such as IP address or device name. This helps improve alarm management and some performance management, and includes a historical dimension, such as a week or a month, depending on the number of devices being managed. The more devices, the shorter the time.

The SNMP Viewer allows tracking of port-related data, such as bandwidth or CPU utilization. When combined with Log Manager, this can give insights by port into information relevant to historical performance.

Looking at what Ipswitch has done presents a healthy challenge to the management software industry. If return on investment were the only criteria, Ipswitch would indeed be hard to match. But management software is a strategic investment, no matter what the price. It can not only save money, but also create revenue through its ability to monitor, control and ultimately provision the infrastructure for business services. So, yes, it may well be worth finding a more expensive solution when business opportunity is on the line. But let's face it - many management implementations are not only far more costly, they are also often less effective than WhatsUp Gold. Before you go out and spend time, money and resources, it may be well worth doing a sanity-check with Ipswitch.

Dennis Drogseth is a director with Enterprise Management Associates, a leading analyst and market research firm based in Boulder, Colorado, focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Dennis has extensive experience in network management platforms and products and is researching trends in management software and changing IT roles internationally. His 18-plus years of experience in high-tech includes positions at IBM and Cabletron. He has been quoted in the press and is a speaker at industry events. He can be reached via e-mail.

Audrey Rasmussen is a research director with Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado, a leading analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management. Audrey has more than 20 years of experience working with distributed systems, applications and networks. Her current focus at EMA is e-business, SMB/SME and MSPs. She can be reached via e-mail.

Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colorado, is a leading analyst and market research firm focusing exclusively on all aspects of enterprise management software and services.

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