WhatsUp Gold Delivers Flow Publisher For Traffic Analysis

Lexington, MA  December 9, 2009  Ipswitch, Inc's Network Management division, developer of innovative network management solutions, today announced the worldwide availability of WhatsUp Gold Flow Publisher v1.0 - a unique, traffic monitoring and analysis solution that extends flow-based analysis to every segment of the network.

With Flow Publisher, customers do not need to:
-Invest in costly upgrades or replacement of existing equipment to incorporate flow measurement and reporting capabilities
-Purchase expensive and hard to deploy hardware probes or flow appliances for traffic monitoring and analysis

Network managers must understand the nature of the traffic flows traversing their network. Knowing which applications, users, sources, destinations and protocols are contributing to network traffic can help them understand the underlying cause of network congestion. Monitoring traffic flows also helps uncover instances of unauthorized or malicious bandwidth usage from external attacks or virus activity. While flow analysis provides the required information and visibility - the majority of switches and some routers currently deployed in networks do not have any type of built-in flow measurement capabilities. The net result is that traffic behavior and performance of most network segments cannot be analyzed without costly network equipment upgrades or complex hardware probe deployments.

WhatsUp Gold Flow Publisher solves this problem by enabling flow monitoring for networks with non-flow capable devices - including switches, routers, firewalls, and servers. Fully integrated with WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor, Flow Publisher immediately provides network managers with the capability to understand sources and destinations of network traffic and detailed bandwidth utilization without the need for flow enabled equipment.

Flow Publisher is a small footprint software application that captures raw traffic from TAPs (Test Access Points), mirrored ports or directly from Windows host systems. It immediately converts the raw traffic information into detailed NetFlow v1, v5 or v9 compliant records delivering user, application and protocol level visibility into the traffic on every segment of the network without major new investments. Flow Publisher capability is unique among market players - and competitive products like Solarwinds Orion do not provide any comparable functionality.

"Flow Publisher delivers in-depth traffic and flow visibility and analysis for every network, and for every customer through a simple, lightweight software-only solution," commented Kevin Gillis, vice president of product management. "Armed with flow data from Flow Publisher, businesses of any size can now quickly pinpoint and resolve issues across their server or network infrastructure. Integrating flow monitoring directly on critical application servers provides a view of traffic not previously available and allows for pinpoint analysis of application issues. No other solution offers this deployment flexibility today."

"Flow Publisher will allow network professionals to quickly, easily and cost-effectively extract vital information about data networking flows within their IT networks," said Dave Thornton, Director at L8 Solutions. "It can help determine where traffic is sourcing and sinking and which applications are responsible for the high level utilization patterns seen on the network - irrespective of the network hardware being used. I would recommend Flow Publisher as a highly valuable addition to any WhatsUp deployment."

Flow Publisher extends existing WhatsUp Gold Flow monitor capabilities, which supports the most widely deployed industry formats including NetFlow, J-Flow and sFlow. In conjunction with the Flow Monitor and the industry's most intuitive, comprehensive and cost-effective network management platform - WhatsUp Gold - Flow Publisher supports intelligent thresholds, advanced alerting, real-time troubleshooting and historical reporting capabilities that are essential for managing the complex network infrastructures of today. It also provides access to more than 40+ web and mobile reports that are available through the Flow Monitor.

Pricing and Availability
WhatsUp Gold Flow Publisher is immediately available starting at US$645 (List Price) for a single license on a Windows server.