WhatsUp: An insight to your network
March 29, 2018
WhatsUp: An insight to your network
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with WhatsUp Gold
Currently, we use WhatsUp Gold for monitoring and maintaining our extended grocery chain infrastructure. This includes the Cisco routers, switches, and wireless APs. The main use is to monitor when a connection drops, switches between our primary connection and secondary connection or any hardware issues that may arise. I do use it a little for NetFlow tracking and Syslogging when needed.
- Monitoring the connection; performance, switching, and issues. We use a broadband connection for our primary and a cellular backup for the secondary. While we use routing protocols to make this switch and WhatsUp isn't used for Syslog monitoring. it alerts us within seconds.
- Backup configurations and archiving. WhatsUp does this particularly well. I use it for both Cisco routers and switches.
- The diagram feature is nice. Though I don't use it as much because of the size of our structure, it does come in handy for mapping routes of all traffic.
- SNMP scripting would be one. Unless you are very well versed in SNMP trapping, you will do a lot of reading/playing/tuning to get exactly what you want.
- The all web interface has been a bit of a bummer. They took a lot of the functions from the admin console that made it easy to add/remove certain features quickly.
- As I mentioned earlier, the monitoring of the external environment and uptime is a necessity. An hour down is a 1% loss of revenue per day which may not sound like much but in a million dollar company, that 1% is a huge chunk.
- The backup configuration has been very handy in turn around time for failed equipment. I did have a homegrown way of backing up configurations but had to check daily and verify every backup. This becomes very time consuming and a waste of company time.
- Only negative is the mapping. In the Cisco world CDP is a great way to map connections and they don't seem to do it that way.
From a initial setup, WhatsUp takes Splunk down. I had WhatsUp up within minutes of monitoring and rebooting. From a PRTG perspective, setup was about the same. Now PRTG doesn't have all the bells and whistle WhatsUp has but for tracking and monitoring Netflow and Syslog traffic its user interface is easier to maneuver, especially since they went to the web interface only.