Progress WhatsUp Gold Enterprise Plus 2024 review: Progress paints a big network picture

Businesses are spoilt for choice with network monitoring software, but few can match the track record of Progress Software's WhatsUp Gold (WUG) as it's been a main player in this market for over 30 years. Well-suited to SMBs and enterprises alike, it has consistently offered an impressive range of monitoring tools, all easily accessible from an informative central web console.

WUG gets the benefit of regular updates and new features with version 2024.0.2 on review offering enhanced device template rules, making it easier to identify and define network devices found during the discovery process. Service monitoring and search facilities have been improved while the WUG Live feature presents a more informative status bar and options to customise what events are displayed.

A key new feature is the NTA+ (network traffic analysis plus) option, which takes flow data from Progress Software's FlowMon Collector appliances. Previously, these data feeds were viewed from the standard NTA analysis dashboards, but Progress Software has repositioned this feature with WUG now providing a separate NTA+ menu option specifically for FlowMon data.

Progress WhatsUp Gold Enterprise Plus 2024 review: Licence to monitor

Progress Software is commendably transparent about pricing and offers WUG in a range of flexible plans. It employs device licences, which are easier to manage than sensor-based licences as they allow you to monitor everything on a device regardless of the number of components.

A Business subscription starts at a shade over £900 per year for 50 devices and delivers all key features, including network discovery, topology mapping, alerting and reporting plus cloud, wireless network and storage monitoring. An Enterprise subscription enables log management plus virtualisation host and application monitoring, while Enterprise Plus starts at around £2,600 per year and adds switch, router, and firewall configuration management along with NTA+.

Perpetual licences are also available with Premium costing around £3,600 for 50 devices and providing all standard monitoring services, while Total Plus activates all WUG add-ons except NTA+, which is only available as a subscription. Confusingly, Total Plus prices are based on points where one device costs a point while monitored applications, log management, and NTA flow sources each cost ten points.

Progress WhatsUp Gold Enterprise Plus 2024 review: Deploy and discover

Installation on a Windows Server 2022 host took 30 minutes, and after adding all required device credentials, our first wizard-assisted network scan only took 10 minutes. The discovery process is very accurate as WUG correctly identified all our Windows systems, switches, VMware and Hyper-V virtualization hosts, firewalls, NAS appliances, and printers.

The WUG web console is easy to navigate as all features are grouped under five main menus in an upper ribbon bar, with the Favourites menu in previous versions replaced with a new one for the NTA+ module. WUG gets down to business straight away by automatically applying a base set of active and passive monitors and thresholds to each discovered device.

Color-coded icons are assigned to each monitored element so you can see easily if they are up or down. The home dashboard can be customised to show just about anything you want, while the NOC (network operations centre) feature presents support staff with a heads-up display that combines slide decks of multiple dashboards with a view duration.

Progress WhatsUp Gold Enterprise Plus 2024 review: Action stations

WUG provides plenty of tools for creating alert policies, linking them with device state changes, and assigning actions. You can choose from 24 actions, including sending SMS and email, restarting a service, running a PowerShell script, and linking up with services such as Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow, and Slack.

The Virtualization Monitoring add-on supports VMware and Hyper-V hosts and will discover them from standard scans. From the Analyze tab, we could select a host and view information about running VMs and their vCPU, memory, and virtual interface utilisation.

The application monitor add-on runs discoveries on devices for apps selected from the WUG library and adds them to its analysis dashboard for at a glance status views. WUG's Configuration Management uses scripts to automatically backup the startup and running configs of devices such as switches and routers, and when multiple files are selected in the configuration archive page, it compares them and highlights any differences.

Progress WhatsUp Gold Enterprise Plus 2024 review: NTA+ features

WUG Enterprise Plus includes a licence for the NTA+ Collector, which can be hosted on VMware, Hyper-V, and KVM hypervisors or in the cloud on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This is a scaled-down version of FlowMon Collector, which enables the FlowMon Monitoring Center (FMC) component and is used for network traffic monitoring, managing NetFlow/IPFIX flow sources, and viewing traffic graphs. Three NTA+ Collector versions are available with the base licence activating a 500 VA model, which scales up in step with the monitored device tier you choose to purchase.

We run the full-fat version of FlowMon in the lab, which was automatically identified by WUG and required authentication using OAuth 2.0, Rest API credentials, and a token URL – all clearly documented. From WUG's NTA+ window, we selected our FlowMon appliance and created dashboards by choosing the number of columns and adding reports from the right-hand menu.

There are plenty of reports available, including events, flows, packets, and response times, and you can add custom reports by creating FMC profiles, assigning channels, and setting them as static or continuous for dynamic views. These appear as perspectives in NTA+, and we created FMC profiles for areas of interest such as Microsoft 365, email, web browser, VoIP, and user activity, and selected a display time period – if you want security event feeds, you'll need to purchase an extra FlowMon anomaly detection licence.

Progress WhatsUp Gold Enterprise Plus 2024 review: Is it worth it?

Oh, yes. WhatsUp Gold delivers an incredible range of network monitoring tools for the price and amalgamates them into a single management console, offering deep insights into all devices, services, and applications.

The Enterprise Plus version on review is particularly good value as it enables all the add-ons Progress Software has to offer. More clarification on the various NTA+ Collector licences would be helpful, but with FlowMon behind the scenes, there's no denying this is capable of providing a wealth of information that will be invaluable for troubleshooting network issues.