Review: Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold Premium

With that in mind, the Test Center has taken a look at Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold Premium -- which the vendor bills as a "cost-effective" management and monitoring solution -- to see if it fits the bill.

What we found: WhatsUp Gold Premium makes managing devices quite easy. Administrators can rely on the WhatsUp network discovery wizard to do the scanning and establish connectivity to all devices. The wizard can identify devices through SNMP, IP ranges and NetBIOS scans, including importing hosts files directly.

According to Ipswitch, WhatsUp Gold v12 Premium Edition lists pricing starting at $2,595 for up to 100 devices.

During testing, the Test Center chose an IP scan range of 254 IPs, even though there were 17 devices present at the time. The scan was slower than expected. It took about 2 hours to identify and connect to 17 devices. To check all devices, reviewers selected every protocol and performance counter that WhatsUp makes available.

To communicate with PCs and network devices, WhatsUp uses Windows credentials and SNMP. The process is simple but it's manual. All SNMP strings have to be entered by hand as well as Windows credentials. WhatsUp can also track NNTP, TCP Echo, ping and time servers. The software can also manage applications that communicate via HTTP, POP3, IMAP4, SMTP and Telnet. Some older technologies are covered as well, like Radius.

By connecting to devices through these protocols, WhatsUp can measure the performance of devices and help administrators manage them. Pinging, for instance, is used as a simple measure of response. Other performance counters such as CPU, disk and memory utilization are useful for tracking the health of servers and PCs.

Once the initial scan finishes, administrators can start to monitor changes to devices. What's Up was found to be extremely stable, even when devices came on and off a network. Devices that lose connection through pings are immediately flagged in red.

By right clicking on a device, administrators can quickly travel to the Properties pane and find the performance monitors and actions that What's Up chose for that device. The properties are customizable and work dynamically, so administrators can run individual discovery processes while they look at my active monitors.

Administrators can also change Windows credentials, including SNMP versions one through three network devices.

The Credentials feature comes with a neat little feature that allows administrators to make copies of SNMP credentials.

The Properties's Menu option is perhaps the most interesting feature. Administrators can build command line scripts or run network commands directly with parameters. WhatsUp provides default parameters for all of the programs that one can load. During a scanning, WhatsUp can report back to the administrator on results. Administrators can add notes to each device to keep a personal log of any manual changes made to the properties.

In addition to the listing all scanned devices on its workspace, WhatsUp also has a visual map feature that neatly displays all of the active and inactive devices. This is a quick way to survey all of the statuses of devices without having to look down a list of what devices are being flagged.

WhatsUp Gold Premium is more than just a useful network scanning tool for collecting SNMP data from devices. It can also serve as a powerful compliance monitoring tool and desktop support client. The Test Center found that administrators can even run remote desktop connections, effectively adding a technical support to a network scanning technology.