Solarwinds vs. What's up gold

bmwagner

Which product would you choose and why?? Looking for any suggestions.

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cisco_trooper

What are you trying to accomplish with said product?

Hyper-Me

we use WUG at work but our network team is ignorant so all they have it do is ping all day long.

They dont believe in SNMP

networkengine

We use PacketTrap. Find the interface, ease of use, and overall experience stronger. It's a bit less expensive too: www.PacketTrap.com

mlentine

The new version of WhatsUp Gold is awesome. It just came out the end of July. It has a new and more powerful discovery and role assignment tool, pre-configured monitors, WMI, SNMP, all alerting in one spot, new plug-ins being released left and right. These guys really have there stuff together and look like they are focused on R&D and it should only get better. I found that they are generally 5x's less expensive than Solarwinds and always seem to be the lowest total cost of ownership too. They have a free eval at www.whatsupgold.com Nothing compares!!

bmwagner

We are trying to do some basic network monitoring of mainly the trunked ports. Be proactive rather than reactive with things.

Silentsoul

Hyper-Me wrote: »

we use WUG at work but our network team is ignorant so all they have it do is ping all day long.

They dont believe in SNMP

That is terrible. But before i started at my place they were doing the same thing.

I implemented Nagios and Cacti with Nagvis. I wouldn't got back. I used FAN nagios to get up and running quick.
If you are interested I can pm a few decent blogs to help get it setup

Hyper-Me

Silentsoul wrote: »

That is terrible. But before i started at my place they were doing the same thing.

I implemented Nagios and Cacti with Nagvis. I wouldn't got back. I used FAN nagios to get up and running quick.
If you are interested I can pm a few decent blogs to help get it setup

Others have recommended Nagios before, but the network team is stubborn.

I appreciate the offer, but unfortunately if i passed it on to them it would fall on deaf ears.

I dont deal with the network at work, I simply run the systems. As long as they keep it running well enough for my stuff to work, i could care less what they do

rsutton

I've used Nagios - liked it. Currently using cacti - like it alot but thought Nagios was less buggy.

UnixGeek

Another happy Nagios user here.

Silentsoul

I really don't think Nagios and cacti are interchangeable, I think they both have their own specific uses. I use Nagios for making sure my host/services are up and to notify me when issues arise. I do use it for some graphing like with some machines disk drives. But i also have alerts set up so i will be notified when they disk reach a certain threshold.
Cacti i use for bandwidth monitoring across our lan/wan and to our cloud. I also use it when I know a certain building will be doing something intensive to keep an eye on the line.

For example when i sent 15 images to machines across our network to a lab, i wanted to see how saturated our line got.

They are both great tools, but i think using them both together is when you really see how they play together and benefit each other.
If you strictly need monitoring, I say go for nagios, there is probably nothing you will need to do that nagios cannot do, either on its own, or with a plug in, or fronted.

rsutton

Silentsoul wrote: »

I use Nagios for making sure my host/services are up and to notify me when issues arise. I do use it for some graphing like with some machines disk drives. But i also have alerts set up so i will be notified when they disk reach a certain threshold.

You can get these features through Cacti. I have thresholds set up for bandwidth, disk usage, processor and memory usage. I get email alerts when my thresholds are breached. I also get the standard alerts of any of my servers or other SNMP enabled devices go offline.

Silentsoul

rsutton wrote: »

You can get these features through Cacti. I have thresholds set up for bandwidth, disk usage, processor and memory usage. I get email alerts when my thresholds are breached. I also get the standard alerts of any of my servers or other SNMP enabled devices go offline.

I have heard that you can in fact do this with cacti but i have never don't it. I had nagios in place first and then enacted cacti for those parts. I didn't want to suggest cacti for that since i had never used it for that.

Gogousa

Silentsoul wrote: »

I really don't think Nagios and cacti are interchangeable, I think they both have their own specific uses. I use Nagios for making sure my host/services are up and to notify me when issues arise. I do use it for some graphing like with some machines disk drives. But i also have alerts set up so i will be notified when they disk reach a certain threshold.
Cacti i use for bandwidth monitoring across our lan/wan and to our cloud. I also use it when I know a certain building will be doing something intensive to keep an eye on the line.

For example when i sent 15 images to machines across our network to a lab, i wanted to see how saturated our line got.

They are both great tools, but i think using them both together is when you really see how they play together and benefit each other.
If you strictly need monitoring, I say go for nagios, there is probably nothing you will need to do that nagios cannot do, either on its own, or with a plug in, or fronted.

We use both the same way, plus NAGVIS (to show something to our boss), I think it is great and you can get a lot of information from them. We use them to monitor everything, the guy who made it work did an excelent job and he almost make them talk

We monitor 200 switches, 280 servers, 150 vpns. And on each device we monitor anything we want like disk space, load average, connections to databases, traffic, bandwidth, time and a lot more as long as you get the MIBs.
To watch all of these you can sit in front of nagios all day or you set values to trigger alarms, that alarm could be email, text message (annoying thing to have when everything goes down), or you can install a plugin in firefox to pop up the alarm.
We are really happy with it and everything for free (well, the time that everyone spent installing an tuning everything was not free

)

cisco_trooper

Currently using Nagios as well....

rsutton

One thing I will say about WUG and Solarwinds is that they are a hell of a lot easier to setup than Nagios or Cacti.

Silentsoul

rsutton wrote: »

One thing I will say about WUG and Solarwinds is that they are a hell of a lot easier to setup than Nagios or Cacti.

A few months ago i would have agreed but look up FAN Nagios
http://fannagioscd.sourceforge.net/

and i have written some how-to's for integrating cacti into the mix.

I also have Nagvis running, i haven't made any custom maps but the auto generated one does for what i need.

Pash

Solarwinds fan here as well, their support for netflow and jflow is great with the NTA tool.

Unfortunately, because jflow isnt supported on juniper ssg/netscreen BUT does work on srx, I had to do with another product recently from a company called manage engine and it is called firewall analyzer 6. Overall its very good!

sidsanders

using zabbix... alerting/perf mon/reporting. just another one of the free ones out there...