VisualPulse monitors devices by pinging them, checking for a response on a specified TCP port, and loading a URL if the monitored device is a Web server. You can set thresholds at two levels—warning and critical—for either latency or packet loss. As Figure 4 shows, you can monitor Web servers in addition to monitoring the system's overall health. VisualPulse can summarize the latency and availability data that it collects for all three data sources (i.e., ping, HTTP, and TCP) and provide performance reports.
VisualPulse starts at $295 for a 10-element license (an element is a pingable IP device). The price tops out at $2495 for a 250-element license, which is the maximum number of elements that a single VisualPulse instance can monitor.
WhatsUp Gold
If a picture speaks a thousand words, WhatsUp Gold speaks volumes. With its unique ability to lay out monitored devices in a graphical format and link higher-level maps to lower-level maps, Whats-Up Gold provides a unique drill-down, graphical view of the health of devices in an organization.
With WhatsUp Gold's auto-discovery capability, defining the devices you want to monitor is easy. You simply instruct WhatsUp Gold to use an ICMP or SNMP scan for devices, and WhatsUp Gold learns what's on your network and automatically maps the results, as Figure 5 shows. All you need to do is a bit of visual rearranging to suit your tastes. WhatsUp Gold also automatically scans for available services (e.g., FTP, HTTP, POP, Telnet) on any device and adds any services that it finds to the device's properties.
WhatsUp Gold's auto-discovery capability is even more useful for intranet environments. You can instruct WhatsUp Gold to periodically rescan the network for new devices. WhatsUp Gold issues an alert for any new devices it finds and scans those devices for available services. This feature is great for networks that are in a constant state of flux.
After you define a device and configure what you want monitored, WhatsUp Gold can notify you of problems by means of pager, beeper, email, telephone, or desktop alarm. WhatsUp Gold can report on and chart historical performance data and availability data. WhatsUp Gold has a flat-rate price of $795 without a service agreement and $1090 with a service agreement, which includes 1 year of upgrades and telephone technical support.
Many from Which to Choose
As you can see, you have many Web-monitoring packages from which to choose. All these packages provide a suite of services and capabilities. You need to determine which services and capabilities are most important to your organization, then pick the package that offers them.