Ipswitch’s Whatsup Gold 11 network monitoring package is an easy-to-set-up system aimed at firms with single network sites. There are two versions: the Standard version and the Premium Version, the difference being that the Premium version includes the Windows management instrumentation (WMI) application and performance management facilities.

We installed the Premium version on both a Windows XP Professional SP2 system and a Windows Server 2003 Standard system, and within five minutes of scanning our Labs IP subnet, we picked up the firewall, workstations, servers, modems and printers.

There are four methods for discovering the network devices present: a simple network management protocol (SNMP) scan; scanning an IP address range; a check of the “network neighbourhood” as can be performed with any Windows system; or directly importing a “hosts” file, which maps hostnames to IP addresses. Although it discovered all devices on our network, Whatsup does not show which devices have connectivity to switches, firewalls or routers.

Once the scan has run and the devices been discovered, users can then choose which devices they wish to monitor and then apply what Ipswitch calls an “action policy”. This is basically a set of alarms that can be triggered individually if the specifically monitored device is not in compliance with the defined policy. We could set up an action policy that would email specific personnel if a firm’s web server went down. Users can also set up beepers, pagers, or SMS to automatically communicate status information to specific network personnel, or even choose to restart the server.

We could also choose to check specific devices using an Active Monitor, which queries network services running in a server or workstation. For example, we could use the Domain Name Service (DNS) monitor to check for a DNS service on port 53, and set up an action policy whereby a “no response” from the monitor would trigger an email alert. Whatsup can also monitor devices passively using SNMP traps, a syslog monitor for checking syslog messages and a Windows Event Log monitor for examining Windows events.

As well as being able to monitor hardware for failure events, Whatsup lets users monitor performance indicators, too. Processor, memory, disk and network interface utilisation can all be monitored and “actioned” for incorporation into specific policies.