| | Connecticut Online - WhatsUp Gold provides a wake-up call for monitoring network performance
There s an old saying that knowledge is power. When it comes to managing a network, this a concept that Jay Ferron, chief technology officer at Connecticut Online Web Services (COWS), firmly believes. The more you know about a network, the better you can manage it and provide value-added service to users.
To help with this search for network knowledge, Ferron uses WhatsUp Gold from Ipswitch, Inc. WhatsUp Gold provides a detailed view of a network, so that network resources can be managed more efficiently. In a few simple steps, WhatsUp Gold auto-discovers all the devices on a network and places them in easy-to-use graphical maps through its SmartScan technology. Once it has mapped a network, WhatsUp Gold will send an alert via e-mail, pager, beeper, or voice mail the moment it detects a network problem.
Additionally, WhatsUp Gold generates out-of-the-box reports to help analyze network uptime, capacity utilization, and response time.
WhatsUp Gold is a fast way to find out if something goes wrong with your network, said Ferron. But even more importantly, it proactively monitors network traffic so that I know if traffic is shifting or moving within the network and I can restructure my resources to accommodate these changes.
Ferron knows first hand how quickly network resources can shift. As a full-service Internet provider (www.cows.net), COWS offers everything from soup to nuts for business-to-business connectivity. Among the services COWS provides is full-time connections to the Internet, VPN support, Web design and hosting services, expert technical support, and network management.
Many of our customers are small to medium-sized organizations that either don t have a designated person to administer their network or they have one person who manages the network and is completely overworked, says Ferron. More often than not, our customers don't even know all of the devices and services that live on their network. With WhatsUp Gold, we re able to quickly create a map that shows customers all the facets of their network.
Ferron says that his customers are very impressed when they see WhatsUp Gold create a map of their network right before their eyes. Customers get a live picture of everything from Cisco switches, routers, firewalls, mail servers, FTP servers, and Web servers that comprise their networks. Based on seeing a demonstration of WhatsUp Gold's capabilities, 60 of COWS customers are now using WhatsUp Gold to manage and monitor their networks.
As any network administrator knows, forecasting trends in network connectivity is a task that often hangs over their heads. Decisions on when and where to add more hardware and software to meet user demands is challenging. By using WhatsUp Gold s reporting features, COWS is able to accurately and proactively analyze where customers may need to make some changes.
Overall, WhatsUp Gold's reporting and notification features have made a significant impact on how COWS and its customers conduct business. Says Ferron, For example, WhatsUp Gold has taken us from being a physically 24 hours a day operation down to less hours than that. We re still on call 24 hours a day but I don t have to have someone sitting here watching the center every moment. For us, that one benefit alone is worth the cost of the product.
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