WhatsUpGold is a great tool for monitoring the status of your network.

We mainly benefit from the alerts system that will notify all specified employees via text/email whenever a part of our network goes down. Typically we will know something is down before our users even notice the problem.

Pros

The alerts are where WhatsUpGold really shines. They are all fully customizable and once they're setup to your specifications they work like a dream. A majority of the time we will know when something on the network goes down before our users even notice the problem!

Cons

This product can do so many different things it becomes a little overwhelming. Once alerts are setup they work great, but the configuration process can get pretty confusing if you haven't done it before. Online training videos on how to configure certain features would be a great tool.

WUG CRA Experience

Alerting and allowing us to be proactive on issues is main focus and WUG has allowed my team to accomplish that goal. Reporting/automating reports and providing different practices within CRA the option of personalized dashboards to gauge performance has been a favorite offering from IT to our end users.

Pros

Goes without saying that it is easy to implement, intuitive and easy to manage. Dashboards and views are ++++

Cons

been using WUG for over 10years and have brought in to 3 different companies i've worked for---to date, i haven't found anything I dislike.

WhatsUp Gold Replaces Monitoring Service

WhatsUP gold is monitoring the same things, if not more, than an IT services company was doing for about $500/mo. This saved us a huge amount of money in the long run and was totally worth the configuration issues we had.

Pros

Customizable to monitor only the network parts/components that we wanted monitored. Able to set it to send email and SMS (via email) alerts to multiple users.

Cons

Network discovery was a bit slow and clunky. After a network change we had to delete the current monitors and do a complete re-scan or it doubled up the devices.

WhatsUp Gold

We use Whatsup Gold to proactively tell us when something is wrong before users start complaining. It has served us well in this capacity We use WUG thresholds and netflow data to determine when business (and non-business) processes are interfering with user performance at our branches with limited network capacity. We use the netflow data and work with the branch to have the offending processes eliminated or moved to afterhours when there is no user impact. We use thresholds and dashboard graphs to provide capacity planning information. Overall WhatsUp Gold has been a mixed bag for us. There have been failed upgrades and bugs that cost us time. Page rendering is adequate at best and frustrating at its worst. But is has provided the monitoring alerting, and capacity planning that we need to stay ahead.

Pros

The ease of adding a device, and getting monitors configured with alerts is what like best. To go from no monitoring to getting a text/email when something goes wrong is relatively easy with this product. The ease of putting specific graph items on a page (dashboard) is also very useful.

Cons

The biggest problem with this product is the performance/capacity of the product to generate graphs. Using java to fetch data from the database to paint pages is slow. I can collect 500,000 data items and generate 100,000 graphs without much horsepower with a tool like CACTI which uses php and flat text rrd files to paint the graph. I can put ten times as many graphs on a page and it still paints 10 times faster. This performance limitation is the biggest week point between your products and the competition. I maintain a CACTI server to do the heavy lifting for graphing high density interface switches in the data centers because WUG is too slow. The thing that I like least about the software is the inability of the administrator to manage other users views. and the lack of an anonymous view. You want to be able to give upper management a link to click on to see pretty graphs and charts. They do not want to have to log in. And you do not want them messing up the view so it constantly has to be fixed. Logging in as admin, changing the users rights, logging out,logging in as the user, changing the dashboard, logging out, logging in as the admin and setting the rights back, is a lousy way to have to manage this.

WhatsUp Gold Review

After everything was set up, we have had almost no issues. The customer support is great and the reps are great. The software has free updates which is awesome and the community board is very helpful. I would recommend this product to any IT environment that is looking for network monitoring solution.

Pros

It fits exactly what we need it to do. Monitor our devices and send us alerts when there is an issue. The schematic is also very helpful because we have it broken down into locations and grouped together to make things easier to use. It is also very helpful to put in all the information we have into the details of the device so that its all in one place. It helps us stay organized!

Cons

The set up was atrocious. We had to run a scan like 6 times to find everything. Eventually I had to add things in one by one which took forever. It is not simple to use. You have to really understand the icons and how things are linked within the software. I wished there was better documentation and videos about this. Especially with the setup. The whole installation and setup was a nightmare.