Ipswitch's latest 'clever little tool' is a must-have for network admins

In 1991 Ipswitch launched its first product. It was a simple FTP client. It still sells the WSftp product to this day, but their focus is on much bigger opportunities.

The private company that is head officed not far out of Boston launched five years later in 1996, a networking monitoring software tool called WhatsUp Gold. The name is literally refers to pinging devices on a network to establish what indeed is up.

Their founder Roger Greene wanted to save time for network administrators on their daily fundamental tasks. He wanted to do this at a fraction of the price of the high profile tools on the market at the time.

From its humble beginnings, WhatsUp Gold is now a modern, scalable tool, with one instance able to manage up to 20,000 devices.

Its functionality has evolved too from just pinging devices into monitoring, configuring and management of these network devices.

Now at version 17 and with 20 years under its belt, Ipswitch has added support for: -    Application performance management -    Automated change and configuration management of most networking devices -    Network traffic analysis -    Virtual environment monitoring -    Storage monitoring -    Wireless monitoring

They have a simple new licensing system called TotalView which works on a per device basis. You buy, say 100 points and can allocate those to devices on the network or through one of the services above. This means that you could use all your points on one particular service or spread them amongst them. The idea being that it's easy to renew and avoids orphaned and unused licenses.

You can operate the software as a stand-alone installation or use a central and remote site configuration. It can also support external databases in larger installations.

25,000 organisations are actively using the software nowadays. A significant number of these are in the Asia Pacific region, including some high profile government and retail clients.

Plans are also underway for a cloud-deployed version of the tool as well as extending their IoT device support in future versions.

With its fast installation, easy to manage and clever notification features, it's a mature tool that every network administrator should have.

Why not try it? They've got a free trial on their website here.