It has also benefited from a solid development program and the latest WUG 2020 adds even more support tools including pulsing device icons for eye-catching alerts, improved reporting and enhanced scalability.

WUG’s licensing plans make it highly suited to a wide range of businesses with the Premium edition available on yearly subscriptions or as a fully licensed version. Alternatively, you can choose points-based licensing where each device, regardless of network ports or hardware components is considered one element and costs one point while NetFlow data sources or monitored applications each cost ten points.

The Premium edition includes a wealth of core features such as discovery, interactive mapping, alerting and reporting plus device, cloud, wireless network and storage monitoring. Add-ons for network traffic analysis (NTA), device configuration management plus virtualisation and application monitoring can be purchased separately or you can choose the Total Plus version which includes them all.

Installation on a Windows Server 2019 host was a swift affair and the routine automatically loaded the requisite SQL Server 2017 Express and IIS. On first contact with the WUG web console, a wizard fired off a discovery routine on the local IP subnet, and after a few minutes it reported back on all our network devices.

The WUG web console is easier to navigate than many competing solutions as its upper menu bar only has four options. From here, we could quickly run network discoveries, view our network topology, swap to a network map view, access a multitude of analysis dashboards and configure WUG settings along with the various add-on components.

All discovered devices are listed under the My Network menu option where each has a colour-coded status icon, so you can see immediately if it’s up or down. WUG automatically sorts devices into dynamic groups using criteria such as Windows systems, storage servers, core, cloud and virtualisation hosts while a rule builder helps create your own groups.

WUG’s dashboards are a great feature as they present a live graphical overview of your network. Accessed from the Analyse menu, these provide detailed views on critical area such as oversubscribed systems, those that are down, the status of active monitors, actions, storage status and wireless activity.

The dashboards are infinitely customisable so you can use them to present your perfect NOC (network operations center) views. Just create a new dashboard, choose the number of columns, select the reports you want to include and decide where they should be positioned.

Alerting is excellent as a tool helps you create policies, link them with device state changes and assign actions. You can choose from 26 action types which include running a script, restarting a service, sending emails, posting alerts to Slack, ServiceNow or OpsGenie and restarting a VMware VM.

The Configuration Management add-on allows you to view multiple device configuration archives, compare them and instantly see if changes have been made. You can even keep an eye on dark web activity as the NTA add-on combines an IP reputation library with flow monitoring and warns you if it sees accesses to Tor (the onion router) entry and exit points.

WhatsUp Gold 2020 delivers a remarkable range of network monitoring tools and its flexible licensing plans make it affordable for SMBs and enterprises alike. The well-designed web console is capable of delivering a wealth of information about the network and all devices allowing support staff to quickly identify, troubleshoot and remedy problems with minimum downtime.

Product: WhatsUp Gold 2020
Supplier: Progress Software Ltd
Tel: +44 (0)1344 360444
Web site: www.whatsupgold.com
Price: Premium - 25 devices from $2,740