Whats Up Gold: Top Draft Pick

By Ron Anderson   Pro football coaches love to have a few undrafted free agents on their team. These players don't cost much, and when they perform, they make the coach and GM look good in the fans' and--more important--the owner's eyes. Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold is the free agent on your network management team. WhatsUp Gold monitors the status of devices on your network and reports problems. I've been following WhatsUp in Network Computing's labs at Syracuse University since it was a freeware utility called WS Watch by John Junod. I'm impressed with its advancement from amateur to pro and am happy to have this utility on our team. At $695, this free agent is a steal. WhatsUp Gold is the everyman n etwork monitor, providing easily distributed information about your network. It's simple to install, set up and maintain. In this release, WhatsUp Gold adds IPX and NetBEUI monitoring, installation as a Windows NT service and Web management capabilities. Scout It Out WhatsUp Gold includes both a GUI and a Web server and runs on top of Windows95 or Windows NT 3.51 or later. In the lab, I set up WhatsUp Gold on a Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and used the GUI to create network maps of monitored devices. I automatically added devices to our maps using the network scan function. The scan function identifies IP devices and ports for a range of IP addresses, as well as IPX and NetBEUI devices. Alternatively, you can create maps using host files or manually. After our network items were discovered, I spent some time making our GUI maps readable using the included drawing tools. Through the device property's dialogs, I also changed device icons to reflect the nature of the device--workstation, router, hu b or bridge, for example, and connected items in a logical map. By drawing connections between items, I created a hierarchy of "up dependencies." WhatsUp Gold uses this hierarchy to monitor operations in a logical fashion. When WhatsUp Gold notices a problem on the network, it can take any number of actions, including sounding an audible alarm; sending e-mail, a digital or alphanumeric page and voice mail; or launching an executable program. Like all free agents, WhatsUp Gold has some rough edges. Some of the map creation operations and other management tasks can only be performed via the GUI. I couldn't autodiscover devices or manually set up IPX devices using the Web. Because of these limitations, I had to alternate between the GUI and the NT service during setup and for routine management. Also, I wanted to provide our network users with Web access to the monitor without the annoying authentication dialog, but couldn't find any documentation on the proper syntax for passing the user ID and password via the URL. Ron Anderson is the manager of Microcomputer Network Services at Syracuse University. He can be reached at rbanders@syr.edu.

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