Monitoring

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from Edgar, a systems administrator at a bank in Northern Europe. Edgar has been at the bank long enough to know the systems inside and out, but his expertise was challenged each time the bank acquired a smaller bank or merged with a rival. The new banks had different systems and plenty of custom applications.    

Servers, networks and applications aren’t the only remote devices that some companies need to manage. Did you know WhatsUp Gold can also monitor point-of-sale devices such as vending machines, in-store video games and ticket turnstiles? In fact, any device that supports ping, SNMP or WMI management protocols.

the company that started with one horse and a cart, and grew because they knew how to look ahead, picked WhatsUp Gold.

The IT life was simpler when employees each had one desktop computer and one landline phone. Technology did not move. It was stationary. Nowadays we have laptops, smart phones, and tablets that are both mobile and connected. And they have no wires. You are told that applications are mission critical,  expected to be accessible by people at a speed that optimizes productivity, and available to people inside and outside the organization. And who else wants access all the time? Hackers and other online criminals. As if you had enough to worry about.

Network Monitoring tools are a must-have for organizations of all sizes. When evaluating solutions focus is often placed on comparing features and ease of use, but understanding the total cost of ownership is very important. The core licensing structure, whether it is device-based, port- or interface-based, or measurement-based, can have a big impact on license costs up front and the administrative workload for maintaining the solution in production over the lifetime of the product.

We are pleased to announce that WhatsUp Gold won Silver in the 2013 Redmond Reader’s Choice Awards Best of the Best for General Network Monitoring Tool.

In my current role I speak to a lot of network engineers trying to automatically map their network topology. Actually it’s more than that, they don’t just want to discover devices, the want a port level diagram of exactly how all their switches, routers, servers, workstations, phones, firewalls . . . you get the point. Some engineers I speak to practically ask:

Other's have already done it for you?

Here is a useful list of tips that network administrators can leverage in their everyday travails.

Network Monitoring comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be as complex as a multi-site WAN distributed solution. Or, it could be as simple as reacting to end-users phone calls claiming that they can’t receive email.