Discovering devices
Installing WhatsUp Gold software takes just a few minutes—a bit longer if you want to use your own SQL or IIS server or safeguard the web GUI with SSL certificates. The real fun starts when you tell WhatsUp Gold what devices you'd like to monitor and how. Those devices can be added to WhatsUp Gold manually or by hosts file import, but most will prefer to populate the WhatsUp Gold database using its native Discovery Wizard.

WhatsUp Gold discovery can be a one-time or scheduled affair. One-time discovery can ping-scan specified IP ranges, browse the server's Windows Network Neighborhood, or trawl routes retrieved from an SNMP-enabled seed router (see Figure 1). Scheduled "Active Discovery" objects can also be used to periodically repeat IP or SNMP scans.

The "best" discovery method depends on how you intend to use WhatsUp Gold. Those focused on SNMP network surveillance will probably prefer the seed router SmartScan while those bent on WMI server monitoring will like Network Neighborhood discovery. We found IP range scans helpful to back-fill bits of our network (like DMZ subnets) not discovered by other methods. Oddly, you can browse many Windows domains in one pass, but WhatsUp Gold can only scan one contiguous IP range or seed router at a time.

The discovery wizard also prompts for necessary credentials: SNMP read community names and Windows domain/login/passwords used to probe each discovered device. These credentials aren't required by basic ping/port scans but are a must for SmartScan and Network Neighborhood browsing.

The final step is to select the Active and Performance Monitors that WhatsUp Gold will use to probe (and subsequently poll) each target (see Figure 2). For example, you can run an IP range scan that just determines ICMP reachability or probes discovered devices for DNS, TCP Echo, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP4, NNTP, POP3, RADIUS, SMTP, SNMP, Telnet, and/or Time services (Active Monitors). Devices accessible via SNMP or WMI can also be polled for CPU, memory, disk, and/or interface utilization (Performance Monitors). To probe other ports or objects, add your own custom Monitors.

By default, discovery adds all found devices to the WhatsUp Gold database. Thereafter, WhatsUp Gold recognizes existing devices by IP address and updates them as needed after future runs—for example, when discovering new services. Fortunately, multi-homed systems with several IPs are treated as singular devices with a designated primary polling interface. Not only does this correlate everything learned about a given physical node, but it stretches your licensed device limit further.

In early tests, we were dismayed to find that hosts with dynamic IP addresses yielded multiple database entries over time. We easily avoided this using a "bulk field update" to poll those devices by hostname instead of IP address. Note that this resolution only works if your DNS is dynamically updated to reflect DHCP assignments.

We found SmartScan discovery to be more efficient and comprehensive than vanilla ping/port scans—it found most of our network quickly with little hand-holding. However, native WhatsUp Gold discovery is limited to layers 3 and 4—layer 2 discovery can be added by purchasing the new WhatsConnected plug-in (see Part 4 of this review).

1. Intro: WhatsUpGold Premium v12.3.1

2. Discovering Devices

3. Mapping Your Network