Mapping your network
Discovery provides a foundation for monitoring and reporting by populating the database with devices associated with discovered data and refreshed thereafter by WhatsUp Gold Monitors and Action Policies (see Part 2 of this review). However, for many admins, another immediate benefit of discovery is being able to visualize the entire network.

WhatsUp Gold presents any monitored network from two perspectives: a Map View and a Device View. Each view's content is filtered by Device Group—a point-and-click label that corresponds to either a static collection of devices or to a dynamic list returned by a SQL SELECT database query.

For example, each discovery pass automatically creates its own static Device Group. We used these static groups to assess each discovery run and answer look-back questions (e.g., when did that device show up?). It's also easy to create custom static Device Groups by using drag-and-drop from other groups (see Figure 3).

To avoid static group maintenance as your network changes, try using Dynamic Groups. WhatsUp Gold includes two main "dynamic groups"—All Devices and All Routers—along with many finer-grained examples (e.g., Printers, Down Devices, Devices in Maintenance Mode). In fact, creating your own custom Device Groups is a good way to get more from WhatsUp Gold. You don't have to be a SQL SELECT syntax expert—just cut and paste from the included examples—although it does help to be familiar with available attributes.

WhatsUp Gold's Device View (Figure 4) provides the usual color-coded sortable list of devices, letting you eyeball all devices of a given type/status or recent changes that have not yet been acknowledged. But for working with groups of reasonable size, we prefer the Map View.

We found SmartScan-generated maps most helpful because they link discovered routers to per-subnet drill-down maps—in effect, plotting our network's topology. (For more robust topo-map functionality, buy the WhatsConnected Plug-In.) All other WhatsUp Gold maps are simply populated with devices—custom layout, links, and annotations are left to the user.

Any map can be organized using built-in tools to group, align, and distribute devices or insert text/graphic annotations. Devices can be attached to each other to depict logical relationships and/or polling dependencies. Furthermore, every single monitored interface or service on a given device can be depicted as an "unconnected link." Doing so provides at-a-glance status but can result in some very busy maps (Figure 5). In short, there are plenty of tools here to produce maps that balance your preferences for status and detail—but putting them to work (or not) is largely up to you.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we look at how WhatsUp Gold puts this foundation to work by monitoring the discovered network on your behalf and firing off defined actions in response to outages and unexpected changes.

—End