"Comprehensive" is the best word to describe infrastructure management service Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold (which begins at $2,656 for up to 25 devices). While Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold doesn't completely fulfill every feature requirement you might have on your administrative wish list, it does cover three broad categories of IT management quite well: infrastructure management, application performance management (APM), and network monitoring. With all that under one hood, many small to midsize businesses (SMBs) will find that Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold is all they need. But, while Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold does compete effectively in all these categories, it doesn't manage to distinguish itself in any of them well enough to warrant an Editors' Choice award. Still, for those IT professionals who are partial to its interface and management interface, it remains an effective option. (Our Editors' Choice award in the infrastructure management category instead goes to MMSoft Pulseway). If you use Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, then everything must run on-premises in order to perform all monitoring tasks, which means you'll need a Windows machine (either Windows 7 and up for a client machine or Windows Server 2008 and up if you want to run it on a server), between 4 GB and 32 GB of RAM depending upon how many devices you're monitoring, and at least 15 GB of disk space (though I'd recommend considerably more if you intend on storing log files on the same machine for any length of time). Ipswitch recommends running Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold on a server platform. On the upside, unlike many of the infrastructure management solutions delivered as cloud services, you won't need to install any agents on your various infrastructure bits because Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold utilizes existing management protocols such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to gather its information. Microsoft officially deprecated support for SNMP with the release of Windows Server 2012 and recommends the use of the Common Information Model (CIM) through Windows Remote Management (WRM) instead. However, SNMP and SNMP WMI Provider is still available on Windows Server 2016 by simply selecting a check box and setting up community names, so reports of its demise may have been premature. Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold will support CIM by the time Microsoft ends support for SNMP, according to the company. The lack of support for a cloud-based console means that you won't be able to manage inward from the cloud. However, IpSwitch WhatsUp Gold now fully supports monitoring of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure instances. You can also monitor Linux and Apache web servers and Microsoft SharePoint. Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold shines when it comes to network management. For one thing, it provides a much better graphical display of ongoing network usage than either Idera Uptime Infrastructure Monitor or ManageEngine OpManager. New Version and Capabilities Ipswitch announced a new version of WhatsUp Gold timed to ship as this update was being completed. We had a brief look at the pre-release version of this package, and it continues with the well-designed web UI, and it adds a collection of important new capabilities. The new capabilities include cloud performance monitoring for AWS and Azure as well as billing performance monitoring, AWS virtual machine (VM) monitoring, support for Cisco Meraki, Cisco AP discovery and monitoring, SSID and interface utilization overlays to create heat maps, and support for Dell Compellant storage discovery and monitoring. Plus it now allows you to post to Slack channel action. A mobile access capability exists as well, although you'll need to work some port forwarding magic to get it to work in most cases. On the virtualization front, you'll find good support for VMware VMs and for Microsoft's Hyper-V. Fast Installation One of the areas Ipswitch focused on for the latest release of Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold is the user installation and discovery experience. They wanted to make Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold the easiest product to get installed and running in the shortest amount of time. And it looks like they succeeded because I was able to get everything installed and a network scan completed in under 30 minutes. Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold found a total of 45 devices on my network including a few that similar products have failed to find. Figure 1 above shows the Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold Admin Console app with the Active Monitor Library dialog open, allowing the creation of a New NT Service Monitor. This feature makes it possible to create unique monitor elements to keep track of critical infrastructure services. In this case, I created an Active Monitor to watch the Microsoft IIS service running on the system with the address 192.168.1.23. Configuring the Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold mobile access requires either a server with a public IP address or port forwarding at the corporate firewall. The Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold documentation isn't a lot of help at this point, stating, "If you want WhatsUp Gold Mobile Access to be accessible via the Internet, then make sure it is available on a server with a public IP." That's a fairly limited implementation of mobility when you compare it to products such as MMSoft Pulseway and Stackify Retrace that both offer easy and full-featured web access. Management Interface Even though its server-side software still needs to be installed locally, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold has a web-based user interface (UI). The previous Windows app has been deprecated and is now only available for a few special functions such as system migration. The web-based UI is very busy with plenty of tabs and buttons to distract you. On a positive note, once you get used to them, all of those tabs actually make it easier to jump from the home page to a specific device or problem displayed on its dashboard. The Layer 2 topology map shows a nice amount of detail including system name or IP address and the port number connection on the switch (see Figure 2 above). You can swap to a details view with a single click and see most of the same information in tabular form. Figure 3 below shows what happens when you select one of the devices and then right-click with the mouse. Selecting the device brings up a detail box with additional information. A right-click operation displays a menu of options allowing you to quickly launch a remote desktop session or the web task manager. The Problem Areas tab gives a quick overview of all devices either in a completely down state or with down active monitors. As with other screens, a single click will take you directly to the information page for that device to help identify the problem. The Alerts screen under the Dashboard tab provides a good overview of all problem areas across the board to include infrastructure, network, and apps. Configuring alerts consists of selecting an existing item from the Alert Center Threshold Library or creating a new one. A custom performance monitor can draw from a range of sources to include PowerShell scripts, SQL Queries, WMI parameters and even UPS status. In general, each performance monitor will trigger an alert when the monitored item exceeds or falls below the threshold value for a specified amount of time. Notification policies provide a way to send either an SMS message or email when individual alerts occur or when the number of alerts cross a threshold. Slick Application Performance Management Plug-In On the application performance management (APM) front, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold includes support for an aforementioned plug-in, appropriately dubbed "WhatsUp Gold APM." With this add-on module, you can gain access to a large library of turnkey app profiles that has been updated in version 16.3 to include support for Oracle's eBusiness Suite, Cisco's Unified Communications Manager (CUCM), and a wide variety of Microsoft back-office platforms such as Active Directory (AD), Dynamics, Exchange, SQL Server, and more. You can also set up custom app profiles using the add-on's Application Profile Development Utility, though your mileage may vary depending upon the guts of the target app. For its part, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold provides access to a Management Information Base (MIB) browser and a WMI library to make this functionality as broad as possible. Once installed, WhatsUp Gold APM delivers APM starting with a dashboard showing multiple app states (up, warning, down, maintenance, and unknown) and can be set to have threshold values for each of these. So, if a particular folder has reached 90 percent of its storage capacity, for example, then WhatsUp Gold APM can be configured to show it as being in a warning state. This can also be extended to app dependencies such as, if your IIS Server is down, then so is your SharePoint instance, which means you can configure IIS as a component of SharePoint for the purposes of APM. Finally, in response to specific app states, WhatsUp Gold APM can be configured to employ user-defined action policies and alert processes. Choose between text or email for alerting, for example, or kick off a certain PowerShell script in response to a certain app warning. You can keep track of all of this via a series of customizable dashboards as well as historical status reports. Tally Your Pricing Pricing for Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold starts at $2,656 for up to 25 devices, which sounds expensive but, compared to products such as ManageEngine OpManager, it's actually fairly reasonable once you get to an actual tally of devices and options. Adding plug-ins, however, can run the price up considerably, depending upon the plug-in. Ipswitch's WhatsVirtual plug-in, for example, adds deeper insight into vCenter and VMware ESXi hosts, at a starting price of $1,809. Overall, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold definitely qualifies as a one-product-fits-all for the three categories reviewed (i.e., infrastructure management, app performance management, and network monitoring). It does have some pieces missing; however, because of its broad support for customization, scripting, and management standards, there are often workarounds for those looking to run the package in non-standard implementations. Ipswitch isn't of much help if things go wrong in such situations, however, so going this route typically isn't for the faint of heart. Still, for most SMBs, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold will provide everything an IT administrator will need, as long as there's some local server muscle for deployment. Bottom Line: Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold is a comprehensive infrastructure management service. Its new version offers capabilities such as cloud performance monitoring for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as well as billing performance monitoring.

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