WhatsUp Gold Product Overview

Network Monitoring Made Easy

If you are like the rest of our user community, your IT team is busy. With pressure to deliver on-time projects, you don’t have a lot of time to spend making your management tools work. You need network monitoring tools that work for you. You want tools that makes it easy to find performance issues before your users do and resolve them before they impact the business. That’s exactly why tens of thousands of customers around the world love WhatsUp Gold: it’s a unified set of powerful, easy to use network monitoring tools that provides an outstanding value with a low cost of ownership in both budget and management time.

Easily Monitor Your Entire Network

Quickly get value from comprehensive discovery and network monitoring tools

WhatsUp® Gold's powerful layer 2/3 discovery results in a detailed interactive map of your entire networked infrastructure. One affordable license gives you network monitoring for any mix of devices, wireless controllers, servers, virtual machines, applications, traffic flows and configurations across Windows, LAMP and Java environments.

Get Proactive Alerts and Instant Visibility

Ensure optimal performance and availability to meet or beat SLAs

Manage networks, traffic, physical servers, VMs and applications with easy-to-use and customizable maps, dashboards and alerts. Click on any device to get immediate access to a wealth of related network monitoring settings and reports. WhatsUp Gold provides the context of how everything is connected and dynamically responds to interactions to give you the fastest time-to-answers.

Resolve Issues Quickly - Before Users Call

Intuitive workflows and easy customization help you reduce MTTRs

WhatsUp Gold streamlines network monitoring workflows by letting you initiate management tools directly from the interactive map.  Easily switch between physical, virtual, wireless and dependency views to resolve issues quickly. Easily-customizable dashboards make for simpler, more intuitive network, application or server monitoring that lets you find resolve issues quickly.

Application Monitoring

Monitor Windows, Linux, Apache, Java and custom applications. Use out-of-the-box profiles to assure that you meet your SLAs. Automatically discover and leverage best practice monitoring profiles for applications, server services and processes. Easily create custom application profiles for your in-house applications. Powerful application monitoring tools include the ability to record web transactions data to generate scripts and monitor the response times of web-applications. Quickly isolate the root causes of performance problems with features that include:

• Built-in monitoring profiles for common applications like Microsoft Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Active Directory
• Customization enabled by editing existing profiles or creating your own custom profiles
• Dashboard and reporting tools let you view the health of all the applications, individual application or troubleshoot at the component level.

Network Traffic Analysis

Assure the performance of critical apps and services by gaining visibility into network bandwidth utilization. WhatsUp Gold provides granular detail into which users, end-points, applications or protocols are consuming bandwidth. With the addition of Network Traffic Analysis , your network devices can send flow records to port 9999 on the WhatsUp Gold server.  We support a wide variety of flow protocols including Netflow, NSEL, sFlow, J-Flow and IPFIX and includes features like:

• A centralized view of network traffic data with built-in reports
• Top application reports using Cisco's NBAR classification data
• CBQoS reports for the details on class-based policies
• Report filters for specific interfaces, ports, applications, or protocols
• Threshold-based alerting on conditions like traffic spikes or bandwidth usage policy violations.

Configuration Management

Support compliance requirements for HIPAA, SOX, FISMA and PCI DSS and other regulations. Streamline configuration backup, archiving and restoration. The Configuration Manager gives you a set of tools that will automate the process of backing up configurations for network devices that support Telnet or SSH.  Other features include:

• Alerts for configuration changes (authorized or not)
• Audits that compare running configurations against defined policies
• Built-in scripts for SNMP string changes, user name adds/removals, configuration backups
• Easy access to configurations from the device properties page
• Compliance reporting from out-of-the-box templates
• Policy monitoring data on all changes and backups.

Discovery & Network Mapping

Get immediate value through comprehensive discovery. WhatsUp Gold network monitoring begins with powerful Layer 2/3 discovery of devices and any networked server. Generate a detailed interactive map of the core, Windows, wireless and virtual resources for an end-to-end view of your infrastructure. Discovery and Mapping tools include:

• Scope of discovery determined by individual IP addresses, seed scan, IP address ranges, or subnets
• Easy to add credentials including SNMP, Windows domain administrator, ADO, Telnet/SSH, VMware, JMX and SMIS
• Scheduling for ad hoc or recurring discoveries
• Built-in device roles, which can be customized or added to, assign monitors based on device type
• Map overlays for virtual, wireless, dependencies and connectivity
• Automatic device group population and user-created static or dynamic grouping
• Map customization with text data, images and custom arrangements of devices to create a network diagram
• Dependencies between devices are used to reduce alert storms and polling overhead

Virtual Environment Monitoring

Discover, map, monitor, alert and report on VMware and Hyper-V performance, resource allocation and consumption for hosts and guests and clusters in your network. Virtual Monitoring gathers performance statistics for the host server and guest, maps out the virtual environment, and allows users to be notified based on information in event logs coming from the Hyper-V/VMware management server.

You can also discover management services (such as VMware vCenters) or individual hypervisors (Hyper-V, ESX/ESXi) running in an unmanaged environment. Using management services to discover virtual machines provides monitoring and logging continuity required in high-availability, fault tolerant or workload managed environments.

Distributed Monitoring

Gain more visibility to remote networks. The distributed network monitoring feature extends the capabilities of WhatsUp Gold to multiple remote networks, allowing a central installation server and one or more remote installations.

Monitor remote installations from a designated central server. Leverage distributed reports to create remote site dashboard views. A number of remote installations can send data back to the central server creating a unified view for managing multiple remote networks.

Failover Manager

Assure minimal monitoring downtime.Automatically switch WhatsUp Gold from a primary server to a standby server when the primary system is not functioning normally. The Failover Console displays primary server and secondary server data including:

• The machine's host server address
• Machine status states including: Active - currently polling the network, Standby - ready to assume network polling, Down - unable to perform network polling, or Unknown
• The state of attempted communication between the primary server and secondary server Possible states include Unknown, Connection, Service, Good credential or Bad credential
• The last time the machine successfully sent a heartbeat message to the other machine

Network Monitoring & Alerting

Keep ahead of network performance and availability issues with powerful Active, Passive and Performance monitors and alerting features including:

• Active Monitors which poll devices for an up/down or yes/no response
• Passive monitors which include support for SNMP traps, Syslog, and Windows Event Logs from networked devices and servers
• Performance monitors using protocols such as SNMP, SSH or WMI to track utilization data of CPU, disk, memory etc.
• Real-time performance monitors for SNMP polling for on-demand troubleshooting
• Action policies that define whether email alerts, SMS alerts, service restarts or web alarms are sent to notify you of state changes of monitored devices
• An Alert Center that centralizes alerts and policies you’ve applied

Reporting and Dashboards

WhatsUp Gold provides a range of built-in reports for network performance, inventory information and device availability. Reporting features include:

• Easy-to-use data sorting, addition or removal of columns
• Depending on the report context you can also apply timeframes or business hour filters
• Flexible report scheduling and email distribution
• Exports in a variety of formats
• Dashboards customization for context-based data review
• User customizable views to see data that is relevant to them
• A thumbtack icon to apply individual report setting to the entire dashboard.

Cloud Monitoring

Automatically discovers, maps and monitors cloud environments including Amazon Web Services and Azure servers. You can monitor availability of these resources based on an algorithm that factors in multiple characteristics including load balancers, virtual servers and environments, and ping (among others). Monitor hybrid on-premises and cloud environments to assure performance across all resources.