WhatsUp Gold

The alerts are where WhatsUpGold really shines. They are all fully customizable and once they're setup to your specifications they work like a dream. A majority of the time we will know when something on the network goes down before our users even notice the problem!

This product can do so many different things it becomes a little overwhelming. Once alerts are setup they work great, but the configuration process can get pretty confusing if you haven't done it before. Online training videos on how to configure certain features would be a great tool.

It fits exactly what we need it to do. Monitor our devices and send us alerts when there is an issue. The schematic is also very helpful because we have it broken down into locations and grouped together to make things easier to use. It is also very helpful to put in all the information we have into the details of the device so that its all in one place. It helps us stay organized!

The set up was atrocious. We had to run a scan like 6 times to find everything. Eventually I had to add things in one by one which took forever. It is not simple to use. You have to really understand the icons and how things are linked within the software. I wished there was better documentation and videos about this. Especially with the setup. The whole installation and setup was a nightmare.

The ease of adding a device, and getting monitors configured with alerts is what like best. To go from no monitoring to getting a text/email when something goes wrong is relatively easy with this product.

The ease of putting specific graph items on a page (dashboard) is also very useful.

The biggest problem with this product is the performance/capacity of the product to generate graphs. Using java to fetch data from the database to paint pages is slow. I can collect 500,000 data items and generate 100,000 graphs without much horsepower with a tool like CACTI which uses php and flat text rrd files to paint the graph. I can put ten times as many graphs on a page and it still paints 10 times faster. This performance limitation is the biggest week point between your products and the competition. I maintain a CACTI server to do the heavy lifting for graphing high density interface switches in the data centers because WUG is too slow.

The thing that I like least about the software is the inability of the administrator to manage other users views. and the lack of an anonymous view. You want to be able to give upper management a link to click on to see pretty graphs and charts. They do not want to have to log in. And you do not want them messing up the view so it constantly has to be fixed. Logging in as admin, changing the users rights, logging out,logging in as the user, changing the dashboard, logging out, logging in as the admin and setting the rights back, is a lousy way to have to manage this.