Daily Network Monitor

By Will Sansbury

Over the last few weeks we’ve shown you the new APC UPS, FTP, and Printer monitors and the new Critical Active Monitors feature. This week we’ll show you two new monitors: the Folder monitor and the File Properties monitor.

Folder Monitor

The Folder Monitor keeps an eye on a Universal Naming Convention (UNC) path on your network and alerts you if the folder’s properties vary outside of the conditions you configure in the monitor.

The Folder Monitor tracks if the folder exists, the size of the folder (both actual size and size on disk, which is affected by the drive’s block size) and the number of files in the folder.

File Properties Monitor

The File Properties Monitor lets you track and alert on the properties of a specific file.

The File Properties monitor can check the existence of the file, the file’s size, the date of the file’s last modification and the file’s checksum (using SHA1, SHA256, SHA384, or SHA512).

Sign up for the WhatsUp Gold v14 Technical Preview Program

Curious to learn more about the new features in WhatsUp Gold v14? You can learn more about the innovations in the new version on the Ipswitch Technical Preview site. Sign up for the technical preview program now and you’ll find out as soon as a technical preview release is available.

Questions? Ask them in the comments!

Popularity: unranked [?]

By Will Sansbury

Here in our research and development office in Atlanta, we’re hard at work putting the finishing touches on WhatsUp Gold v14 network monitoring software. The excitement here is palpable–we’re delivering some huge enhancements, and we can’t wait to get them into the hands of our customers.

Last week, I gave you a preview of the new Critical Active Monitors feature, which solves a longstanding headache of receiving too many alerts when a device goes completely offline. Today, let’s look at the solution to another pain point that we hear about often.

We’re fond of saying that there’s not much you can’t manage with WhatsUp Gold. Between the SNMP monitor, the WMI monitor, and the Active Script features (that let you write custom VBscript and Jscript code to monitor just about anything), you can keep tabs on just about anything if you know where to look for the data. But knowing where to look is sometimes difficult, requiring you to do a lot of research. What MIB should you be using? What counter, what OID, should you be polling?

Let’s be honest: who wants to do that sort of research to keep tabs on something simple, like the amount of toner left in a laser printer?

Now, in WhatsUp Gold v14, we’ve done the research for you for a lot of commonly monitored devices, and we’ve packaged them into simple, easy-to-use monitors. Here’s a preview of just three of them.

Printer Monitor

The Printer Monitor lets you easily track the health of your printers, helping you correct error conditions like paper jams and predict maintenance issues like needing a new toner cartridge.

APC UPS Monitor

The APC UPS Monitor watches your APC UPS device and alerts you when selected thresholds are met or exceeded, output states are reached, and/or abnormal conditions are met. For example, an alert can be sent when the UPS battery capacity is below 20% or when the battery temperature is high.

FTP Monitor

The new FTP Monitor does a lot more than check for a connection on standard file transfer ports. It logs into an FTP server and verifies that you can upload, download, and delete files–all without disturbing the contents of your FTP server.

WhatsUp Gold v14 includes several other new monitors, which I’ll showcase in future posts. In the meantime, if you want to be among the first to see the latest and greatest, sign up for the WhatsUp Gold v14 Technical Preview Program!

Popularity: 6% [?]

By Will Sansbury

Before you ask: yes, we’re skipping version 13. We’re not an especially superstitious bunch, but it just seems like version 13 might be a bad idea. So we’re on to version 14–which will get its first public exposure with a Technical Preview release in April. If you want to test drive the latest and greatest in network management, go apply to be a part of the Technical Preview Program now.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll give you a sneak peek at some of the new features and innovations in WhatsUp Gold v14. First up is a response to the single most common feature request we’ve received from our customers.

Critical Active Monitors

Critical active monitors finally give you the ability to set dependencies on the active monitors that are applied to a device. In the past, if you wanted to monitor a Web server, for example, you might have applied several active monitors:

• A Ping monitor to tell you if the device was unreachable on the network.
• An HTTP monitor to tell you if the Web site was accessible.
• An HTTP content monitor to tell you if the content of the Web site changed.
• An HTTPS monitor to tell you if the Web site was accessible over an SSL-encrypted connection.

To get meaningful details about down monitors in your notifications, you would attach a custom action to each monitor.

That all worked fine–until your Web server crashed and WhatsUp Gold spammed you with four separate messages. In this example, four messages is not that big a deal, but imagine if you were monitoring dozens of aspects of a device: you could end up with a full inbox fast when a device went completely offline.

Critical active monitors fix that. Now, you can specify a monitor as a “critical” monitor. When a critical monitor fails, WhatsUp Gold stops trying to poll all of the non-critical monitors applied on the device. You get one message telling you what you care most about knowing.

Sign up for the WhatsUp Gold v14 Technical Preview Program

Curious to learn more about Critical Active Monitors and the other new features in WhatsUp Gold v14? You can learn more about the innovations in the new version on the Ipswitch Technical Preview site. Sign up for the technical preview program now and you’ll find out as soon as a technical preview release is available.

Questions? Ask them in the comments!

Popularity: 6% [?]