InformationWeek

May 10, 1999

Monitor Gives Heads-Up

System flags outages before they happen

By Amy K. Larsen

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pswitch Inc. this week is rolling out the latest version of its network-monitoring system, with an expanded feature set that includes new reporting capabilities to help IT managers catch problems before a serious outage occurs.

WhatsUp Gold 4.0 offers two kinds of reports: events and statistics. The event reports supply IT managers with an ongoing log of device and service outages they can use to compile incident reports and find chronic availability problems.

"This is a pretty basic product, but sometimes simplicity is good," says Earl Harmon, an independent network administrator working at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts. Harmon has been using WhatsUp Gold for six months to monitor events on more than 100 servers, hubs, and routers. "What's great about [the new version] is we can see a problem before it has a serious impact on service," he says.

Event reports come in summary and detailed versions. The summary reports tally the number of system and service outages and the total downtime during a reporting period. IT managers can define the length of the reporting period.

Statistics reports aggregate data on critical polling statistics such as round-trip time on an individual device and on a per-day basis so network managers can troubleshoot problems and performance issues. As with event reports, IT managers can define the reporting period.

HDL, a consulting-services company in Michigan, uses the application to notify customers of its server-collocation division if a failure occurs in their primary service.

WhatsUp Gold lists for $695. The software is available immediately.