At the midsized company I work for, we've been using an older network monitoring system for about seven years. It gives our administrators basic up or down information about servers and services, and it sends SMS (text message) and phone alerts to our cell phones in the event of problems. I decided it was time to upgrade or at least add a more current tool that could provide improved performance and detailed status information about our Exchange Server, SQL Server, and Terminal Server systems on the network at an affordable price. I came up with three viable candidates: Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold Premium, ManageEngine's OpManager Professional, and SolarWinds' ipMonitor. All three of these network monitors cost less than $3,000 (for 100 devices) and are available for trial periods so that you can test drive them for yourself. Let's see how they stack up.
The Discovery Process
To prepare for testing, I first needed to enable SNMP on all devices, including our Windows servers. I set up read-only SNMP access by configuring the SNMP settings for each device on the network that I wanted to monitor.
In Windows Server 2003/2000, you install the service from Add/Remove Programs, Windows Components; in Windows Server 2008, you add the SNMP feature from Server Manager. Then, you need to go into the Control Panel Services applet and configure the SNMP service—a quick and easy process. Managed network devices such as firewalls, switches, routers, and printers will also have SNMP management capability and are usually quite easy to configure. For more information about SNMP, see the Microsoft appendix "Simple Network Management Protocol" (technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb726987.aspx).
Next, I installed all three monitoring systems on one of two Windows XP SP3 machines at my desk. Once installed, each system consisted of a database and web server. In all three monitoring systems, the system is meant to be used from the web server interface by multiple individuals, and you can configure credentials with full or varying levels of limited access. Each user to either system has the ability to add, remove, and reposition widgets on his or her dashboard. Widgets give insight to a particular aspect, such as processor or memory utilization, across many devices on the network.
Before using each monitoring system to scan the network (called the discovery process), I added credentials that the monitoring system would use to gain access to each device that it discovered on the network. Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold Premium has credential options for SNMP, Windows, Telnet, SSH, ADO, and VMware; ManageEngine's OpManager Professional has options for SNMP, Windows, Telnet, and SSH; and SolarWinds' ipMonitor has options for SNMP and Windows.
After configuring SNMP at the network devices and credentials (Windows and SNMP) for each of the three monitoring systems, I ran the discovery process on a range of IP addresses in my local subnet. All three monitoring systems discovered about 70 devices. Using the default scanning options, all three monitoring systems did a good job identifying each device type, as well as providing a lot of insight into device status. All three included several monitors for what you would expect in a network monitoring system, such as processor, memory, disk usage/utilization, packet loss/latency, Exchange/Lotus, Active Directory, and every Windows service on the system. All three products had the ability to add monitors to each device one at a time or large groups of devices all at once.
Both OpManager and WhatsUp Gold include interfaces for identifying and collecting VMware events on VMware host and guest servers. Also, both OpManager and WhatsUp Gold contain a switch port mapper, which shows you what device is connected to each port on your managed switches. With this information, you'll know which port on each switch contains the link to critical business applications without having to physically trace wires in your server rooms. Then, you can configure alerts on the switch devices for these individual ports. With OpManager, it's easy to get the switch port mapper results by selecting the switch and running the Switch Port Mapper tool; the product returns results within a few seconds. In the case of WhatsUp Gold, the tool is called MAC Address and needs to be run with the Get connectivity option turned on. WhatsUp Gold takes much longer to get the results, as it appears to be scanning and calculating connectivity information for the entire subnet.