What to do when you need to turn off your existing monitoring system, but don’t want to fly blind.

Maybe there was a security issue. Maybe there were spikes in cybercrime. Maybe changes from COVID-19 have made it clear your incumbent monitoring solution isn’t meeting your needs. Or maybe there’s been a recent policy change and  your management team has asked you to power off your existing solution. What do you do? You simply can’t “fly blind” in today’s networks. You need a solution, fast.

Problems

• I need an alternative to my current monitoring solution
• I need a monitoring solution that can meet my requirements
• I don’t have time to configure a totally different monitoring solution
• I have never used any other monitoring solutions

Solution

WhatsUp Gold is the answer when you need to replace an existing monitoring solution in a hurry. No matter what’s driving the need for replacement, a free trial version of WhatsUp Gold is immediately available. The trial has all the features of the full product and, if nothing else, gives you two weeks of functionality while you figure out your permanent solution. That can be a lifesaver while you’re dealing with the ramifications of a cybercrime attack or a security breach because your team probably has bigger and more immediate issues to deal with. If you like WhatsUp Gold you can easily stick with it, but for an immediate replacement you can have it up and running in less than a couple of hours.

I’ve worked directly with many customers migrating to WhatsUp Gold from other solutions over the years. There is typically a common theme here: WhatsUp Gold can do most of what the competition does, directly out of the box but at a much lower cost. There may be certain requirements you have that WhatsUp Gold can’t achieve directly out of the box. This does not mean WhatsUp Gold cannot meet these requirements. It simply means you need to tell WhatsUp Gold how to meet those requirements.

In very little time, you can get WhatsUp Gold up and running within your environment. Simply install it on a Windows server, then add your networks credentials, (which you’ll already have from your other monitoring solution) discover your networks (which you can output from your other monitoring solution), and then tell WhatsUp Gold which systems you’d like to monitor.

This will get all your network devices (routers, switches, firewalls, etc.) monitored in-depth. Very few customers I work with need to monitor anything on their network devices aside from pinging their associated IP addresses, checking CPU/Memory/Interface utilization, verifying specific network interfaces are available, checking environmental sensors, and verifying power supply status. Do the competitors do more in certain situations directly out of the box? Yes, sometimes, but that doesn’t mean WhatsUp Gold can’t monitor the same exact thing.

WhatsUp Gold is extremely simple to customize. You can easily create what we call “monitors” to look at almost anything you can think of. Need a specific SNMP counter? Simply tell WUG which SNMP values to look at our track. Want to check the status of a service? Simply create a “Service Monitor” using point-and-click style configuration. What about custom applications WMI counters? That’s also supported. The key point is that WhatsUp Gold can monitor anything you can populate data about. The catch here is, you must first tell WhatsUp Gold about those specific things. Once you do, you can even have those monitors automatically assigned to the proper devices using our discovery processes roles and sub roles. With WhatsUp Gold’s automated resolution capabilities, you can also fix these problems. For example, running a SSH command, restarting a Windows Service, running PowerShell scripts, and much more.

But, what if you don’t have the time to dedicate to a migration such as this one? Progress can help once again! With Progress professional services, you can work directly with me – the WUG.ninja. Allow me to walk you through WhatsUp Gold  showing you around the UI, explaining the best practices, the why’s and the how-to’s, as well as providing recommendations on what else you may consider monitoring based off my near decade of experience monitoring a complex IT environment as a systems administrator.

Since then I’ve been working directly with customers implementing WhatsUp Gold for 7 years, so I have seen it all. Remember, WhatsUp Gold has add-ons as well. You can collect network traffic (NetFlow) data and report/alert on it, automate your network configuration backups, and much more. I’ve very rarely encountered a use-case WhatsUp Gold can’t cover in some way, shape, or form.

If you need a replacement network monitoring solution you should  download an evaluation copy of WhatsUp Gold today and get up and running quickly. You can always contact Progress sales to change your evaluation license to a production one later if you decide to purchase WhatsUp Gold. Not only can you solve your immediate problem, you’ll probably also save on your renewal budget. And, of course, you’ll look like a hero by providing an immediate solution. Isn’t that worth a couple of hours of your day?