By Erin Hayes

Twenty years and counting in business and WhatsUp Gold just keeps getting better!

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!

Popularity: 42% [?]

By Ennio Carboni

As President of Ipswitch Inc.’s Network Management division I have had the opportunity to speak with many of our customers about their experience using WhatsUp Gold.

Now, because WhatsUp Gold can be deployed and utilized in a variety of ways, each new story I hear varies from the last. But I have noticed a few common themes over the years. One such theme sounds like this:

“The phones stopped ringing as soon as it was deployed on the network.”

In fact, a few weeks ago I had a new customer call up our sales team and rave about the silence he and his team have enjoyed since they implemented WhatsUp Gold on their network. No more phone calls about the network being slow, that this server is down, that the Internet isn’t connecting, etc.

Because of the powerful systems and performance monitoring WhatsUp Gold delivers, these guys are finally the first to know when something is wrong on their network. They can now fix an issue before it affects their users.

This latest customer interaction reminded me of our history with job-search-giant, CareerBuilder. As a longtime user of WhatsUp Gold solutions, our product has literally grown along with CareerBuilder’s company.

In its early stages in 2003, at a point when the job search site was just one-fifth the size of the market leader, they brought in WhatsGold to solve their basic monitoring needs. As they’ve grown and matured, becoming the nation’s largest online job site, WhatsUp Gold has stayed a step ahead to continue to provide them the tool-set and functionality they need to manage a network that now includes close to 1300 devices.

Despite the evolution of technology and the increasing complexity of networks and managing solutions, we know that with most of our customers it is still the little things that make such a big difference. Mark Fouraker, Technologist at CareerBuilder, touches on just that in a favorite quote of mine from this customer story:

“My favorite story about WhatsUp Gold is when I was in an important meeting and was getting silent alerts on my pager about an impending issue on our network. I was sneaking out at breaks to troubleshoot and address the matter, eventually resolving it. The bottom line is that no one outside of a few people in operations had any idea there was even an issue at all. It’s just a beautiful product.”

A story like this is really powerful, in my opinion, because it shows how technology can evolve and customer needs can change, forcing us to continually adapt and innovate our product to meet those changing needs. It also shows that business relationships can certainly last as long as it remains mutually beneficial, with a bit of give and take from both sides.

Popularity: 51% [?]

By Erin Hayes

I had a few free hours yesterday afternoon inbetween Sunday obligations so I did what many people do when blessed with extra time; I powered on my gaming console and sank into my couch for a quick game or two.

I’ve been trying to wean myself from my “Little Big Planet” so I thought I’d download “Heavy Rain,” just to see what all the hype was about.

Unfortunately for me my gaming console of choice is PlayStation 3. (Don’t think I don’t hear you Xbox fanatics chuckling to yourselves that owning a PS3 is indeed unfortunate, but let’s save that argument for another post.)

Instead of “Heavy Rain,” I received this message:

8001050F Registration of the trophy information could not be completed. The game will now quit.

I tried three more times before I broke out my computer and did a quick Google search to see what the heck was going on. It didn’t take long for me to find other users experiencing the same frustration.

It was official; the PlayStation Network was down.  Bummer.

And the outage seemed to be only effecting the older versions of PS3. Meaning Double Bummer for me. I don’t yet own one those new “slim” PS3 models.

Sony acknowledged the technical issue on their blog Sunday night and said it was working on a fix.

“We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, and genuinely appreciate your patience while we work to resolve this,” Sony social media manager Jeff Rubenstein posted on the PlayStation blog.

I wondered what, if anything, they use to monitor their network. I wondered if they had deployed WhatsUp Gold on the PS3 network whether or not I’d be sitting on my couch wondering what to do now.

I can’t help it. It’s the first thing I think about in these situations. I thought about the flood of phone calls those in charge of PSN must be drowning in at that moment.

In this world where nearly everything happens online Network management software is no longer a Nice to Have. It is definitely a Need to Have.

If PSN does not have a Network Management solution in place I’m willing to bet they will have one in the very near future.

In the meantime they’ve released that the source of the problem has been identified as a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system. Sony says it hopes to resolve the issue in the next 24 hours.

If you, like me, own an older PS3, Sony advises we keep our consoles turned off until further notice.

Popularity: 47% [?]

By Mike Manfredi

An ordinary day for a network administrator can tend to be anything but. Whether you’re dealing with help-desk tickets, installing new applications into the infrastructure or troubleshooting a network outage, there never seems to be a shortage of tasks on your daily to do list.

One of the more important aspects of your job, when it relates to maintaining optimum network performance, is managing network device configurations and changes within those devices. The fact is, device configurations are the key to a properly functioning network, and when changes go unnoticed, or devices fail, the impact felt across the network can be detrimental to business operations.

Obviously, with the level of importance of maintaining network device configurations being so high, there are some related tasks that are necessary to keep your infrastructure up and running at its peak at all times. Backing up configuration files in the event you need to restore or replace any failed devices rapidly, limiting the impact felt by the network, is vital. Also, when changes are made to device configurations, it’s important to compare running files to stored files in order to speed up operational response.

Those are just a few of the main tasks that are necessary to complete in order to gain complete control over your device configurations. The fact is, this is not a simple aspect of network management to maintain, especially if you are tasked with conducting these jobs manually.

We at WhatsUp Gold realize the stresses you have to face daily, and try to do what we can to make life for you that much easier. When it comes to  Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM), WhatsUp Gold WhatsConfigured offers you peace of mind by automating the critical tasks necessary to maintaining your device configurations around the clock.

Don’t take my word for it though, listen to Rachel Kennedy, Senior Information Developer in the Ipswitch network management division, for a full description of WhatsConfigured’s command line:

Popularity: 40% [?]

By Erin Hayes

Is That Barbie in the Server Room?

It’s official folks. Being a geek is, without a doubt, chic. Even Barbie’s doing it!

Mattel announced last week that Barbie’s 125th career would be that of a computer engineer. Girl’s come a long way since her days as a secretary hasn’t she?

Barbie’s latest foray into the working world was determined by an online vote – Mattel’s first. A profession in high tech beat out equally progessive occupations such as Architect, Environmentalist, news anchor and surgeon.

Imagine that. After all the years tech enthusiasts have logged being pegged as “computer nerds” and a busty blonde plastic mold comes along and makes it trendy.

I wonder if her “Interests” would include long walks in the server room and magic gatherings. But I digress . . .

Popularity: 44% [?]

By Erin Hayes

Join Our 14.2 and WhatsVirtual TTP

Ipswitch’s network management division takes pride in developing software that keeps our users on the cutting edge of industry standards. You need a network management solution that will continue to evolve as the industry evolves.

The latest product we’ve been developing, WhatsVirtual, is an answer to the growing industry trend toward virtualization. It is now essential for IT professionals to have a tool that allows them to effectively monitor and manage their virtualized environments.

Join our WhatsVirtual Technical Preview Program and be the first to give us feedback on this new tool. We view our TPP participants as an integral part of WhatsUp Gold’s product developement.
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The success of WhatsUp Gold’s Traffic Analysis tool late last year was without doubt due in part to your feedback and participation in our Flow Publisher TPP.

Flow Publisher is a lightweight complement to WhatsUp Gold Flow Monitor (Flow Monitor provides detailed insight into how your network bandwidth is utilized by collecting NetFlow, sFlow and J-Flow data) designed for those networks that don’t support flow data.

So cross Budget For Costly Upgrades and New Hardware off your To Do List: Flow Publisher; enables flow monitoring for every network segment and for every device whether or not they natively support flow monitoring. Flow Publisher captures raw network traffic and converts it into standard NetFlow records.

Here’s a quick 101 of network traffic analysis terms you should be familiar with in order to effectively get a handle on your network’s performance

* Top Offenders: The top offenders are those users, applications or hosts that are consuming your network bandwidth.
* BitTorrent: This is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data, which allows large files to be downloaded without affecting the performance of the network.
* WAN Data Traffic: This refers to traffic slowing down the performance of the wireless environments, usually consisting of FTP or copying files between sites.
* Security: Proper network traffic and performance monitoring allows you to detect DOS attacks and other rogue activity directed at your network.

Popularity: 35% [?]