There are plenty of actions to choose from and these range from activating a warning sound or pop-up window on the console to running programs or scripts, sending messages via email, SMS, pager or beeper and restarting selected services.
WhatsUp Gold offers a web interface for remotely accessing the console. It brings workspaces into play, where you can customise views to include multiple graphs and device status tables. For our servers and workstations we could add graphs covering time periods up to 30 days and performance monitors for CPUs, disks, memory and network interfaces.
Split Second Graphs can be added to the workspace to provide real time graphs, charts and gauges and these can include the Windows Task Manager. It's easy enough to organise the workspace as graphs and charts are positioned using drag and drop.
Extra active monitors have been provided with one specifically for monitoring networked APC UPS devices.
WhatsUp Gold doesn't disappoint in the reporting department and it also maintains logs for all monitors. The new Alert Centre aims to make sense of all the information coming in from the various monitors and helps spot those where thresholds have been breached. Its main control page provides a complete rundown on all alerts and offers filters to fine tune the information being displayed.
This latest version of WhatsUp Gold delivers an impressive range of network monitoring features for the price. The Premium version is simple enough to deploy and looks quite capable of looking after large networks with a diverse range of systems, applications and infrastructure equipment.
Verdict
Despite the sheer range of features in v14, Ipswitch has done a good job in keeping them easily accessible. The device discovery routine is even smarter than before, although it’s about time Ipswitch simplified custom dynamic group creation, as this still something of a pain point. Even so, if you want full network device and application monitoring, along with sophisticated alerts, then the Premium edition is well worth the outlay.
Processor: 2GHz dual core or faster Memory: 2GB or greater Hard disk: 4GB of disk space OS: XP Professional SP2, Server 2003 SP2, Vista Ultimate or Business, Server 2008
