ISPPlanet NMS Series - Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold 5.0

Reporting

WhatsUp Gold generates a robust set of on-demand and recurring reports. An Event Report presents a summary or detailed list of "device down" and "service out" events for a time period and map. The Statistics Report summarizes device reachability over time. Extensive performance graphs can be produced using Crystal Reports (right). Daily, day-of-week, monthly, and comprehensive reports covering time periods, devices, and maps can be viewed and exported in many formats.

Considerable analysis is provided for network/device-level stats. For service-level stats, use web reports (see below) or generate your own reports from logged data.

Recurring reports are essentially scheduled notifications, triggered every N minutes (left). For example, send a mail message every hour, enumerating devices and services that are currently up and down and the last N lines of the log. Because they are based on notifications, recurring reports can use any alert vector (e.g., email, pager/beeper, invoked program). For example, use a recurring report to write logged events to a file server hourly.

Web Interface
Like many low-cost managers, WhatsUp Gold does not really provide distributed management. You could use several copies of WhatsUp Gold to independently monitor parts of your network, but there's nothing built-in that would integrate independent views.

But, whether you run one copy or ten, you can remotely configure and monitor WhatsUp Gold using a full-featured web interface. This makes it easy for several administrators to view status concurrently, from any location. Web access can be disabled entirely, constrained to specified IPs/subnets, and protected by user login/password (right). Features available to each login can be customized; for example, allow customers to view status, but restrict reconfiguration to ISP staff. One word of warning: WhatsUp Gold is installed with web access enabled and a no-password guest account. Most ISPs will remove the guest account or add a password.

The web home page summarizes status for each loaded map (below, left). Links enable drill-down to each map, available in graphic or tabular "summary" format. Drill-down to individual device level to view service statistics and logged events. Through the web interface, downtime, alerts, and availability stats are available for each monitored service (below,right).

Depending upon privileges granted to the login, many configuration and reporting features can also be accessed through the web interface. Even NetTools are accessible from the web interface. In fact, we were running a port scan when we encountered our only WhatsUp Gold crash—an unexplained (and probably unrelated) access violation that could not be repeated. Discovery is just about the only major task not supported through the web interface. When running WhatsUp Gold as an NT service, its important to think about which maps should be automatically loaded. By default, only the top-level map is loaded; subordinate maps are not loaded—or polled. Additional maps can be loaded automatically or manually through the web interface.