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This overview first appeared in concern 354 of PC Pro.
Progress Software program has been busy creating its flagship network-monitoring software, and WhatsUp Gold (WUG) 2023.1 introduces a raft of recent options with ease of use given a excessive precedence. Beforehand, you needed to manually allow monitoring for each gadget, however now you can set a community discovery scan job to do that for you.
What’s extra, the invention course of mechanically collects SNMP and WMI gadget attributes and updates them in real-time, whereas WUG’s dynamic SNMP desk monitor populates each occasion, making it simpler to watch particular units. The gadget properties web page clearly exhibits which credentials are getting used, entry security has been tightened up with TLS 1.3 help, and SQL Server Categorical 2022 is now the default database.
Licensing is much more versatile. Together with the usual variations, perpetual licenses and points-based choices, Progress has added three yearly subscription plans. The Enterprise version begins at round £715 per 12 months for 50 units and, not like sensor- or element-based merchandise, WUG doesn’t care what number of CPUs are in a bunch or the variety of ports a swap has.
This version helps 1,000 units and consists of core capabilities akin to community discovery, topology mapping, alerting and reporting, in addition to cloud, wi-fi community and storage monitoring. The Enterprise version has limitless gadget help and permits virtualization host and utility monitoring plus log administration, whereas Enterprise Plus provides community visitors evaluation and configuration administration for switches, routers and firewalls.
Set up on a Home windows Server 2019 host took round half-hour, and discovery is swift. A wizard helped conjure up the primary scan and, after we’d added all our device credentials, it took ten minutes to ship a whole listing of all our community units.
The WUG console is simple to make use of. It presents 4 menu choices in its higher ribbon bar, and you may add steadily used views to the Favorites tab by clicking on the star icon on the high proper of the console. It’s easy to create customized community discoveries, and you may pull up community topology views and maps.
Evaluation dashboards are an important function that assist you to design a number of customized views, add columns and select the metrics you need to see. Something WUG is able to monitoring may be included, so you possibly can create very detailed dashboards, and every gadget is assigned a coloured icon for immediate standing views.
The brand new community operations middle (NOC) function manages collections of views that rotate to a schedule for presenting help groups with a giant heads-up dwell standing show. To create them, you click on the identical star icon, select the NOC choice, add objects to a slide deck, enter a show length in seconds and go the URL to help workers to allow them to entry it immediately.
Alert insurance policies hyperlink gadget state adjustments with an intensive vary of actions together with operating a program, restarting a service, sending emails and posting alert messages to Microsoft Teams customers. The Alert Heart presents much more details about disk utilization, and the gadget properties web page has been up to date so you possibly can see which actions have been utilized to it.
WUG is a good selection for companies operating the Progress Flowmon home equipment as it might monitor them and embody their visitors evaluation in its dashboards. Normal reporting instruments are in abundance, too, they usually can now be emailed in HTML format so nontechnical customers can admire them.
WhatsUp Gold 2023.1 is straightforward to deploy and presents a formidable vary of network-monitoring instruments. The selection of licensing plans makes it an reasonably priced choice for SMBs, and help groups will love its sensible dashboard and NOC views.