BlueCat Gateway is an enterprise automation platform that turns business logic into automated DDI workflows, and integrates with adjacent systems & technologies.
N/A
Progress WhatsUp Gold
Score 7.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
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.
It is well suited for quick manual updates, not too many as the interface could stand an overhaul. Not an easy interface to use when doing research - reverse lookups. Results aren't always accurate. The search capability could be a bit more robust, expanding the search capability into the comments area would help.
[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.)
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.
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.
BlueCat is the only DNS manager platform that I've had experience with. We had one prior to this, but it was before I had the need to interact with it doing one of the tasks I do now. I remember the switchover to BlueCat - not everyone was impressed with it, but so far my experience with it has been positive.
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.
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.
