WhatsUp Gold developed by Ipswitch (acquired by Progress Software May 2019) offers network performance monitoring and mapping. It supports core monitoring features, including automated workflows and network capacity planning, and monitors across hybrid environments.
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Zabbix
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.
[Progress WhatsUp Gold (formerly Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold)] is good for what it is. An inexpensive but accurate monitor for alerting on systems and services. However, it is time consuming to configure, The GUI leaves a lot to be desired and the formatting for txt alerts stinks (I just use it now as an alert to check my email to view the actual alert.)
Because we spread out in different locations, we can't always know the status of our devices. Zabbix solves this issue for us. As soon as we see an alert that the remote site is down, we can solve it right away. I can't think of a scenario where it was less appropriate for us.
While it does require a whole server with IIS and a SQL db it is low impact on resources but still quick to respond.
Great for quick notifications about a server going above a configured resource threshold. We don't have to look at every server's resource utilization individually anymore.
Quick and easy to setup a service up or down notification.
Alerts; Zabbix allows deep customization of conditions and alerts giving you the ability to perform nearly any scripted action in a variety of scenarios
Inventory; having one place to see a list of all on-going problems and list of servers within your organization is critical
Graphs; screens or graphs showing customizable and color-coded historical usage is a necessity in any monitoring software
While it is easy to get up and running, I know I could utilize the software better if I had some formal training on it. There are a wealth of features available, but I don't have time to learn them all in depth.
The training classes offered are very expensive. I'd love it if IPSwitch offered some kind of reasonably priced training options.
It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.
Well i find the tool quite useful for my daily network monitoring purpose. We get the alerts easily through SMS which saves us lot of our times and effort. The tool is highly customizable which i mentioned earlier which helps to create different alert criteria for different device or system.
The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.
We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.
WhatsUp Gold gives you a much better in-depth analysis and understanding of both your network and endpoint devices but the emphasis should be laid more on report generation. WhatsUp Gold has the ability to generate a report (e.g device uptime, bandwidth utilization, device health etc) and track events that took place even as low as 5 minutes ago.
The software's I mentioned are great, but they are overpriced comparing to Zabbix while it's a free open-source application. The value its adding has high price than any other free open-source apps. the monitoring and alerts details and the friendly user interface is stacking up against any other apps in the web.
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.
Zabbix has had a positive impact on uptime of our external facing website. Users don't always call up our Customer Service team to report that something is down - sometimes they just abandon the website all together. By having a monitoring solution that tells us when things are down before customers do, we are able to respond quickly and avoid losing visitors and ultimately sales.
