[WhatsUp Forum] RFI to Address Large Environment Administration

[Bill_Busby/MO/americancentury]

I'm early on in the adoption of What's Up Gold (not even sure the PO's been
sent out yet and am running out of eval days fast...) and I do have to say
I like the program for what it does. The only concern I have so far is the
administration in large environments. I sent the following email to
IpSwitch
this morning to in the hope they could be addressed in upcoming releases.
If any of you feel these suggestions would add value to the product in your
environment I'd appreciate you commenting or sending your own RFI to
IpSwitch.

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I suppose the best I can do at this point is to encourage your company to
consider putting some additional features into WUG to help reduce the
administrative burden in large environments. Using my company as an
example, we already have a significant investment in the creation of an
enterprise framework for availability monitoring with events that flow
towards our Operations Center. When we bring in new tools, like WUG, we
don't make them stand-alone solutions but integrate them. I wrote a short
Perl script (compiled to an exe) that takes a program notification for an
up/down event and sends events to my Tivoli Event Console (TEC) server
which handles notifications/display for Operations.

WUG seems to reliably deliver something I'm missing in my environment, but
the administration is going to cost me down the road. This tool is designed
to be used by administrators and I need to make it available to them. But,
I've got a couple of NT admin teams, a UNIX team, a network team, my team,
and an electronic commerce team that need to manage their own devices. I've
got some maps that have over 200 devices and having to dig through them all
to make simple changes is a chore. At some point people are going to
configure something in a nonstandard way that compromises the monitoring.
I don't mind writing the code to audit the environment, but I've got to get
at the data stored in the map definitions.

Some suggestions I'd like to see in future releases would be:

Include the ability to set more device attributes 'globally' (select group
and apply, like the replace alert notifications feature). The attributes
I'd most like to set by groups are the device type (nearly all our 512 NT
servers are detected as Workstations), info line 1 & 2, log trigger levels,
SNMP settings, monitor on/off, etc.

Add an export function with selectable maps and device attributes. For
maps, be able to export the parent/child relationship. For devices, allow
for the selection of attributes to export and possibly some option to
specify the field separator (either 'tab' or user defined char). The
ability to export to csv or fixed len ASCII should satisfy any need to
integrate with other products.



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