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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SolarWinds Serv-U
Score 9.0 out of 10
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SolarWinds® Serv-U® is presented by the vendor as an easy-to-use FTP or MFT server software designed to deliver security, automation, and centralized control for file transfers in an organization. Deployed within a data center, Serv-U FTP or MFT Server can help users safely exchange files within your organization and with your business partners. Do not risk file transfer data getting exposed in the cloud and compromise security. Serv-U software is built to be an effective self-hosted…
[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.)
I believe that SolarWinds Serv-U is well suited for small to medium businesses that do not require an expensive high-end FTP server. Also, once the server is configured the daily administration can be handled by less experienced IT personnel. In my opinion this product may not be the right solution a large enterprise with heavy FTP traffic.
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.
The Wizard allows us to create new user accounts very easily and quickly. We do not have a formal IT department so those of us "mere mortals" can use this easily.
Using the Web Client has made it very simple to set up and instruct our customers on getting to the server from any device with a minimum of fuss. We have many customers with ESL, and school students including middle and high school. Most of them are not computer experts, just regular users so the simplicity allows to do the whole setup over the phone in minutes.
The newer version of Serv-U does not appear to be very resource-hungry so our computer runs nice and fast, without having to be a top of the range powerbox. We concentrated on large storage to cope with the file sizes we receive daily.
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.
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 overall interface of SolarWinds Serv-U was better in my opinion than that of Cerberus. We had several outside users demo both and the SolarWinds desktop client was the selling point for them. Both had an option, but SolarWinds was more user friendly, which was a big plus. Everything else was pretty close between the two.
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.
