Daily Network Monitor

By kmyers

WhatsUp Gold v14 Premium was recently added to the U.S. Department of Navy’s Application and Database Management System (DADMS) list. Previous versions of WhatsUp Gold have been on the list since v11. As a member of the DADMS list, WhatsUp Gold v14 Premium has been rigorously tested to ensure compliance with the Navy’s application reduction initiative.

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.

Popularity: 39% [?]

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 Mike Randolph

A Gem of an Application in WhatsUp Gold

Have you ever wanted an easy way to view multiple WhatsUp Gold reports or other application data at a glance? The Dashboard Screen Manager is a great solution to do just that. It’s a stand-alone utilitarian application that’s included with WhatsUp Gold Premium, Distributed, and MSP editions. It’s designed to display a series of Web pages, or a “playlist,” on one or multiple monitors. The Dashboard was developed as a complement to WhatsUp Gold, and as a tool to help keep your network status highly visible. 

The Dashboard runs on a single or multiple display panels and cycles through report pages on the WhatsUp Gold web interface. This capability provides network administrators with important network information on display at all times, cycling and changing report pages without the need of constant configuration or manual navigation. It also provides the capability to view multiple networks that you’re monitoring simultaneously.

Though the Dashboard Screen Manager was developed to work along-side WhatsUp Gold, it can display any web page. For example, a network admin for an Internet business providing service to a small town in the desert glances at a screen on the Dashboard and sees that the connectivity to the town is down. With a display showing the weather for this town on another screen, the network administrator quickly sees that the extreme temperatures of the day have likely caused problems for the cable transmitters. Now she can take swift action to resolve the problem.

The Dashboard Screen Manager is simple to install and configure. Just run the install program, located in the default folder C:\Program Files\Ipswitch\WhatsUp\Dashboard_Setup.exe. Now configure the web pages you want to display and you’re set with better visibility to web pages and reports that are critical to maintaining network performance. For more information about configuring the Dashboard Screen Manager, see the WhatsUp Gold Help.

-This post was written by Mike Randolph, part of our amazing Research and Development team down in the Atlanta office-

Popularity: 21% [?]

By David Karp

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. It’s also the last Friday before Christmas and New Years, the last pay period of the year, and for me, the pivot point between budgeting and planning ahead for 2008, and starting the performance review process looking back on 2007.

In January we’re going to kick off a marketing campaign with our new white paper about the skills and methods of the most effective network administrators and tying it in to the idea of new years resolutions. I wonder though, if the average network tech or admin could take a minute to reflect on the highs and lows of the year, what would really be the networking new years resolutions for 2008?

I suppose the usual stuff would be there – lose weight, quit smoking, save more money for retirement, volunteer more, work out more, write the great American novel – after all network admins are people too, but what kind of things do techies resolve to do next year? Perhaps some of these:

* Get Cisco certified
* Spend less time in World of Warcraft
* Finally replace that [fill in the flaky old piece of hardware of your choice]
* Write that blog you’ve always wanted to write, an expose of the life of a corporate IT professional
* Pay for those shareware utilities you depend on every day
* Drink less Mountain Dew
* Reduce the portion of your cubicle devoted to action figures to no more than 50%
* Demand the budget to upgrade your network management tools to the latest versions

OK, I guess that might be a little self-serving, but I’ll leave it to you to chime in with your own in the comments. What are your top networking resolutions for 2008?

Popularity: 1% [?]