Ipswitch WhatsUp Professional

Know Thyself

After discovery, I was presented with a list of a few hundred devices, as well as the IP and services each device supports. As is usually the case, some devices were not correctly identified. Switches running HTML servers for their configuration interfaces, for example, showed up as HTML servers, and workstations running SMTP often were identified as mail servers. Our actual mail server was identified as a Linux server.

Once I had correctly identified the discovered devices on the network, WUP placed them in default groups with subgroups defined by subnet address. User-defined grouping is also possible, but the groups must be statically and manually created. There are no automated options, such as using OID (Object Identifier) or structured names for populating groups. Not good on a frequently changing network.

Easy on the Eyes

There are six preconfigured views--Health, Performance, Availability, Sys, Windows Event and SNMP trap logs--that are automatically populated by the discovered devices. A push of a button begins performance monitoring on any device--a capability I'd like to see on a group basis.

WUP eliminates unnecessary polling using two parent/child dependencies. An Up dependency causes the child to be polled when the parent is up; Down causes the parent to be polled when the child is down. I set up a hierarchy of connected ports on our network using Down dependencies so that leaf devices (those outside the core) would be the only devices polled until there was a problem, after which the core would be polled. Device connectivity is granular to Layer 3 only, so I had to know which devices were attached to which ports to make full use of the dependencies.

WUP is a good next step for midsize businesses. Although it lacks some bells and whistles--for example, automatic dynamic grouping of devices and Layer 2 topology-- WhatsUp Gold users should be pleased with the improvements.

Bruce Boardman, executive editor of Network Computing, tests and writes about network management and systems. Write to him at [email protected].