Other members of the WhatsUp Gold Family are frequently used by government offices and Federal agencies. For instance, WhatsUp Gold Event Log Management Suite is not only used by the U.S. Navy, but also the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Department of Homeland Security, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and all branches of the U.S. military.

Having the newest and most up-to-date versions of WhatsUp Gold allows government organizations to be confident in the availability, health, and security of their critical infrastructures. It is our hope at Ipswitch to continue to provide powerful network management solutions that maintain the high standard of performance and adherence to regulations the U.S. Navy and other Federal branches have come to expect. WhatsUp Gold v14 Premium and WhatsUp Gold Event Log Management Suite continue this tradition.

We’re excited to announce our largest release in the history of Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold today – v14.2.

We couldn’t have done it without our customers – literally. You guys are responsible for the development and inclusion of four new major features:

-       Business hour reporting was the #1 requested feature

-       Blackout summary notifications was the #4 most requested feature

-       Errors and discards monitoring was the #6 most requested feature

-       PDF scheduled/email reports was the #9 most requested feature.

We are also releasing two new plug-ins:

-WhatsUp Gold WhatsVirtual – Now you can monitor and manage both physical and virtual VMWare environments from a single console!

-WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager – Keep your peace of mind that your WUG data will be safe with this secondary WUG Server in the case of a primary server failure.

In addition we’ve made many improvements to three of the four other plugins, WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor, WhatsUp Gold WhatsConnected and WhatsUp Gold WhatsConfigured.

But I’ll let you hear about it from the Guru. Don’t forget to check out our YouTube or Viddler channel for a complete set of tutorial videos for this release!

The Basics of WMI and Why You Need to Monitor It

WMI is short for Windows Management Instrumentation. The technical definition for WMI is the infrastructure for management data and operations on windows-based operating systems. It is based upon the Desktop Management Task Force (DTMF) standard and is a specific set of extensions to the Windows Driver Model that provides an operating system interface through which instrumented components provide information and notification….

I know, that seems like a whole bunch of technical jargon that still sort of leaves you wondering, what the heck is WMI and why is it important?

Basically, the purpose of WMI is to define a  non-proprietary set of environment-independent specifications which allow management information to be shared between management applications. It prescribes enterprise management standards and related technologies to work with existing management standards such as DMI and SNMP, and compliments them by providing a uniform model. Based on the Common Information Model (CIM), which is an open standard that defines how managed elements of an IT environment are represented, WMI includes most of the Microsoft applications available today such as SQL Server, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and others.

So why is the ability to monitor WMI enabled applications and devices? Well due to a constant increasing exposure of management data through WMI in windows, more and more IT administrators and managers started to develop scripts and automation procedures based on WMI. This has since lead most management software companies in the world to become WMI-enabled and capable of consuming and providing WMI information through various user interfaces.

WhatsUp Gold was one of the first network and application management solutions to fully support WMI and offer complete monitoring capability for WMI enabled desktop and server OSs and applications. Using WhatsUp Gold WMI monitoring capabilities, network managers can immediately understand the health of their servers and applications to pro-actively understand and resolve issues before they become real problems.