Manage your WhatsUp Gold installation for 24/7/365 Operation

Monitoring the management system is as important as minding your critical network infrastructure. After all, if your monitoring system is not performing robustly, gaps in data collection and reporting can make it hard to diagnose real issues with applications, systems and devices.  The result – missed opportunities for troubleshooting or, even worse, flying blind during an actual network outage. While the WhatsUp Gold is proven as a reliable and robust management tool in over 100,000 networks, its functioning may be impaired by issues common to any application – systems degradation, insufficient capacity or over-utilization, or, lack of available network bandwidth.

With WhatsUp Gold Self-Monitoring in place, you can:

• Track WhatsUp Gold Server and Flow Monitor application health through detailed reports
• Monitor underlying database, process and service status
• Proactively identify system slowdown or gaps in reporting and initiate remediation measures
• Fine tune thresholds to align with service level requirements in your organization
• Streamline the WhatsUp Gold monitoring workload and adjust archival timeframes

WhatsUp Gold Self-Monitoring system accessible through the Alert Center features the following key monitors:

WhatsUp Gold Database Performance Monitors

WhatsUp Gold Database performance monitors report status on multiple system parameters:

• Number of performance monitor records in the database – sends alerts if it exceeds configured thresholds
• Number of passive monitor records in the database – sends alerts if it exceeds configured thresholds
• Number of expired records in the database – sends alerts if it exceeds configured thresholds and which may require changes to archival timeframes
• License limit – sends alerts if the license limit has been exceeded

WhatsUp Gold Service Status

Status of the following WhatsUp Gold Services can be viewed from Alert Center:

• Polling service up/down status and duration
• Discovery service up/down status and duration
• WhatsUp Gold Web service up/down status and duration
• Polling engine queries against database (number of queries) – to identify if SQL queries are taking too long on average
• HTTP response times – to track if responses are taking too long on average

WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor Status

If the WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor plug-in has been licensed, Alert Center provides status of Flow Monitor components and flow records collected by the Flow Monitor including:

• Main database size – sends alerts if it exceeds configured thresholds
• Archive database size – sends alerts if it exceeds configured thresholds
• Collector service up/down status and duration
• Number of Host records – sends alerts if it exceeds configured thresholds
• Bounced traffic – alerts if any traffic between sources and collector is lost
• Raw hourly/daily records – reports and alerts if the number of records exceed configured thresholds
• Licensed number of data sources –sends alerts if it approaches purchased license limits

Ensure physical condition of network equipment is within range and not a cause of failure

You have spent a lot of time and effort in planning the monitoring of your network infrastructure. This includes providing for sufficient capacity, processing power and bandwidth. However, all this may come to naught if basic physical and environmental conditions are not maintained. Over heated server and network rooms could result in the failure of equipment or minimally reduce their useful life. Server and network equipment vendors are realizing this and adding probes that can report on physical conditions like temperature and available power. WhatsUp Gold continues to track these introductions and bring them under its monitoring umbrella. Custom monitors can easily be set up if your equipment exposes SNMP MIB objects for any physical conditions.

Current hardware monitors supported by WhatsUp Gold include:

American Power Conversion (APC) Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)

The APC active monitor enables immediate monitoring of over 60 different parameters. APC UPS devices are monitored and alerts are sent when selected thresholds are met or exceeded, output states are reached, and/or abnormal conditions are met.

Available in the Premium, Distributed and MSP edition of WhatsUp Gold, the APC performance monitor enables immediate monitoring of output power usage. Any APC UPS’s discovered are automatically monitored. Status is provided via graphs in the workspace reports.

Temperature

WhatsUp Gold obtains internal device temperature measurements from Cisco switches and routers, Dell servers, HP Procurve switches and external temperature measurement devices from Ravica.

Fan

WhatsUp Gold automatically obtains internal fan status from Cisco switches and routers, Dell servers, Dell Powerconnect switches and routers and HP Procurve switches.

Power Supply

WhatsUp Gold automatically obtains internal power supply status from Cisco switches and routers, Dell servers, Dell PowerConnect switches and routers and HP Procurve switches.

Printer

The printer active monitor supports any manufacturer equipment that supports the IETF Printer MIB, RFC 3805. Any printers found to support the Printer MIB during the network discovery process, are automatically assigned preconfigured active monitor. Pre-configured performance monitors tracking ink/toner levels for example, are also automatically assigned with WhatsUp Gold Premium, Distributed or MSP versions.

Typical Problem Solving Scenarios

WhatsUp Gold enables you to identify and remediate potential problems resulting from sub-optimal operating conditions for hardware equipment:

• WhatsUp Gold sends alerts when the UPS battery capacity is below a configurable threshold, or the battery temperature is high, or when the battery is in bypass mode due to a battery overload state.
• High temperatures can cause devices to malfunction, and can be tracked through performance monitors or split second graphing
• When potential problems are identified with fan operation they need to be replaced, as inaction can lead to downstream issues with high temperature and resulting failure

If you have any inquiry, please feel free to contact E-SPIN.