Firing off actions
Every WhatsUp Gold Discovery run ends with the option to configure Actions. This initially struck us as odd, since Actions don't fire during discovery—they are triggered by subsequent state changes. However, those who want to get the most from WhatsUp Gold should not bypass this opportunity.

WhatsUp Gold Actions can be used for anything from simple state change notifications to complex auto-remediation scripts. Just two Actions are pre-defined: one to generate an audible alert; another to launch a pop-up message on the WhatsUp Gold server. When applied to a device, these Actions occur when any monitor has been up or down for 5 minutes and once again after 20 minutes of down-time. Frankly, these became annoying fairly quickly—we think that most operators will prefer creating their own Actions.

To facilitate this, WhatsUp Gold offers a healthy collection of customizable Action types (see Figure 5). If you just want to be notified, Actions can easily send an email message, page, SMS text, web alarm, or SYSLOG event. To react automatically, Actions can also try to restart an affected Windows service or run any executable program or batch file from the Windows command shell. If your needs cannot be met by these built-in types, you can also roll your own VBScript or Jscript Action, using attributes to provide the necessary context.

For example, we defined Email Actions to send defined messages to our NOC, protected by TLS encryption and SMTP authentication. By default, Email Actions identify the affected host, its current state, and a list of "up" and "down" monitors. That content can be augmented with payloads returned by various Active or Passive Monitors—for example, letting recipients eyeball Exchange or SQL Server WMI attribute values as they were at the time the Action fired. Such details can be essential to deliver actionable alerts instead of content-free nag messages.

However, care must also be taken to avoid Action floods—a cranky device or service that flip-flops could fill your mailbox or run up SMS charges. This can be partially avoided by specifying Action Policies that can be applied to Active Monitors (see Figure 6).

For example, we implemented an escalation Action Policy to send a message to the NOC operator after 5 minutes down, followed by another message to the NOC supervisor after 20 minutes down. If the NOC operator remedies the problem in less than 20 minutes—or manually changes device state from Down to Maintenance—no escalation occurs.

Blackout schedules control the days/times during which any Action can fire (e.g., to direct notifications to different destinations during each shift or on weekends). Action Policies are limited to a few pre-defined durations, but you can set your own durations by editing Device States (a global program option). Beyond this, we'd like the ability to threshold the number of times that any given Action can be triggered (e.g., generate no more than 10 SMS messages per day per object).

Like Monitors, Actions and Policies can be added to the WhatsUp Gold library and selectively applied to each device—for example, applying service restart Actions to Windows devices only, or mapping defined pager Actions onto devices that a particular organization is responsible for managing. It's even possible to configure Recurring Actions that fire on scheduled days/times (e.g., to direct status messages to your mailbox every Monday morning.)

Responding to outages
Status changes triggered by Active and Passive Monitors can be viewed from the WhatsUp Gold console using the Device or Map Views described in Part 1 of this review. For example, when a device goes "Down," the corresponding icon (and all associated shortcuts and Device Groups) turns Yellow, then Red. When that device comes back up, the icon turns transparent Green and then solid Green after 5 minutes. Devices with polling dependencies may also become Grey (Unknown) whenever device(s) in front of them go down, suspending active monitoring and related actions for dependent devices.

Operators can investigate changes by invoking standard or custom tools linked to each device icon's customizable menu, including traceroute, ping, connect (telnet), browse (http), or remote desktop (on Windows devices). But in most cases, operators will want to begin by reviewing Device Status or Group Reports.

WhatsUp Gold Reports are not presented through the console. Instead, they are displayed by a web GUI, launched whenever you click on any Report menu item. In fact, after discovery has been completed, we recommend using only the web GUI, designed to serve as your own personalized workspace. Stay tuned for Part 3 of this review, where we explore the web GUI and dig into status, historical, and real-time reports.

1. Polling and probing

2. Firing off actions