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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Veeam ONE
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Veeam ONE is virtualization management technology from Ohio based VMware partner Veeam Software.
[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.)
Veeam One works great for monitoring virtual infrastructure. However, other dedicated server monitoring apps do better with monitoring the individual VMs. Where it stands out is its reporting functionality, which allows you to forecast growth and keep track of how you are using your resources. It is also great for companies without a big monitoring budget, as there is a pretty functional free version.
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.
Proactive Alerting - the product can provide email alerts to notify one of any issues in the environment.
Capacity Planning and Forecasting - it has the ability to provide an analysis of the current environment as well as provide a report to forecast future capacity requirements.
Monitoring and Reporting - the software can monitor you environment 24x7 with the ability to provide comprehensive reporting.
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.
Basically the products works very well and we have been very pleased, but following are some picky details I could suggest for improvement specific to our needs.
We leave the GUI up on a TV in our Office and on our desktops to visibly see if anything is alerting. It would be nice if you could customize the view to have a smaller minimum view with just the widgets you wanted.
When the GUI starts on a multi-monitor setup it always returns to the primary and any popup windows always go to the primary instead of the monitor you have the application running in.
The software is a joy to use. The user interface is good overall and you can find frequently needed things easily and quickly. Some less frequently needed things eg. settings are hidden under several menus and one might have to look for those for a while. We also haven't had any issues with the products reliability.
Support, as mentioned earlier, is often slow to respond for Veeam ONE requests. To Veeam's credit, they will work on an issue until they find a solution, and will even develop a specific hotfix for your environment if one is needed, but response time is just slow.
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.
Veeam One is very easy to use, easy to configure and get what you want. The integration for Veeam Backup is perfect, for today i think Veeam need to make Veeam One monitor Microsoft 365 envirioment, this will give great imput and integrated with Veeam Backup for 365 will be amezing.
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.
The most valuable reports can safe us a lot of headaches and downtime. What used to be an emergency once in a while is an afterthought as we proactively prevent those same issues in less than 5 minutes a week.
The simplicity has allowed us to offload some virtual environment monitoring to a junior associate.
Initial deployment took some time because we couldn't get licensing figured out, but it has been smooth sailing since then.
