Managing Your IT Network Infrastructure with IPSWITCH WhatsUpGold
As your network infrastructure grows, it becomes a challenge to monitor every single device in the organization. These include server services, server diskspaces, application ports, network devices such as routers, switches and firewall. It becomes justifiable to have a Network Monitoring Tool that can monitor the uptime and performance of these equipments and services. Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold is capable of doing just that plus it is very easy to install and configure.
Network discovery can be defined by IP address range, SNMP SmartScan, Network Neighborhood & HOSTS file. Unlike other Network Monitoring Tools, WhatsUp Gold does not need an agent to be installed on individual servers. All that is required is the Administrator credentials to access the network attached devices SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). I fact, with the Premium Edition, you can add WMI (windows Management Instrumentation) performance monitors to gather information of the devices.
Other than accessing the WhatsUp Gold console on the Server, you can administer via Web Console which is also installed during the initial installation. You can go 1 step further and change the default Web Console screen to your corporate picture (just like I did).
There are 3 types of monitoring that WhatsUp Gold does:-
1) Active monitors
Active monitors are responsible for watching over device services. Active monitors regularly poll the device services for which they are configured and wait for responses. If a query is returned with an expected response, the queried service is considered “up.” If a response is not received, or if the response is not expected, the queried service is considered “down” and a state change is issued on the device.
Active monitors are stored in and configured from the Active Monitor Library.
2) Passive monitors overview
Passive monitors are responsible for listening for device events. Note: Because passive monitors do not poll devices on a regular basis, they use less network bandwidth than active monitors.
Passive monitors gather information that goes beyond simple Up or Down service and device states by listening for a variety of events. For example, if you want to know when someone with improper credentials tries to access one of your SNMP-enabled devices, you can assign the default Authentication Failure passive monitor. The monitor listens for an authentication failure trap on the SNMP device, and logs these events to the SNMP Trap Log. If you assign an action to the monitor, every time the authentication failure trap is received, you will be alerted.
It is highly recommended to use passive monitors together with active monitors to provide a powerful network management.
3) Performance monitors overview
Performance monitors are responsible for gathering information about performance components of the devices. The gathered data is then used to create reports that trend utilization and availability of these device components.
WhatsUp Gold performance monitors gather data from the following five device components:
CPU utilization
Disk utilization
Interface utilization
Memory utilization
Ping latency and availability
Additionally, you can create custom performance monitors to track specific SNMP or WMI performance counters.
Other than providing a tool to monitor your network, WhatsUp Gold is able to alert you by sending text messages, playing a sound, sending an application or even text SMS. All that is required for SMS forwarding is a mobile broadband modem with a subscription plan with a local provider of course! 
In conclusion, Ipswitch Whatsup Gold is an effective and yet a simple tool to monitor the network and does a good job in alerting the network admins.
Opening the GTX 260
