I attended the WhatsUp Gold training class this past Thursday
and Friday in Austin, TX. and thought I'd share my impressions
(a.k.a "ramblings") with the list... Let me preface this by
pointing out that I've been using this product and recommending
it to many of my clients for years.
Was it worth my Time?
Yes. I picked up many of the new features in WUG 8.0 (events,
interface monitoring and mapping, map file format and exporting,
etc), as well as several older features that I hadn't used yet.
The swapping of stories and tips with the other students was
equally valuable; we had a class of seventeen- one student over
a full class!
Was it worth the price?
At $750/day, it's more expensive than other technical training
I've looked at (Microsoft, CompTIA, SUN and Cisco), which all
seem to run around $500/day. If you are planning to renew your
Service Agreement or purchase another WUG license, use that to
bargain for better pricing (John, Mary and Traci will probably
kill me for saying that!). I'd feel better shelling out the
full $1500 (or even a little more) if they added a third day
to cover SNMP/RMON, COM and some general Systems/Networking
Monitoring/Management concepts in detail.
How was the Instructor, Brad Wilkus?
Great- good presentation and delivery, good listening skills,
and great depth of knowledge about WUG- he loves the product!
Brad is a Consultant based out of Florida; I believe he is
travelling around the country doing all of these classes,
which seem to be running about three a month.
How was the facility?
Great- I had thought MicroTek was a small hole-in-the-wall kind
of training facility. They're anything but that- very helpful
staff, clean and spacious facilities, great lunches, and recent
model PC's that were well configured and ready to go.
How was the material?
The time spent in labs and instructor-led examples were great,
but the manual blows big time. Sorry Ipswitch, but this thing
SUCKS! The presentation section is 105 pages (single-sided) of
210 PowerPoint slide printouts; the lab section consists of 66
pages (again, single-sided) covering 15 labs. There are also
small Glossary and Appendix sections.
My recommendations to improve the course?
1) Buy some of the Microsoft or SUN official training material
and learn by example...
- Start by adding a Table of Contents (this makes it much
more useful as reference material after class is over).
- Include additional detail around each slide (refer to the
Microsoft material for some decent examples).
- Print it out double sided to reduce the size!
- Include a section at the very beginning, covering some
basic terms around Network (or "Systems") Monitoring (or
"Management"). What is the difference between these terms,
and how does Ipswitch characterize WUG? I classify it as a
Systems Monitoring tool, but what do I know? ;)
2) Establish a model or framework for understanding this whole
Network/Systems Monitoring/Management space- a discussion
on the ISO FCAPS Management model would be a great start,
followed by an outline of how monitoring capabilities of
increasing complexity build on each other (this allows us
to compare various products capabilities to each other);
I show clients something like this (higher capabilities
are only found in more expensive products):
App Response times (not really supported in WUG)
Processes/Daemons/NT Services
Multiple network interface handling
SNMP Metrics and Traps
TCP/UDP Scripting
TCP/UDP Port scan (well known services and custom)
Network (ICMP PING)
3) More information on integrating additional tools. The MRTG
lab was OK, but missed several key pieces, such as the use
of wperl.exe instead of perl.exe, use of indexmaker, and how
to imbed html tags in the info field of various objects so
that MRTG graphs show up in the WUG web interface.
Expand this to include a brief overview on using/integrating
many of the tools we SysAdmins rely on; RRDTool, VNC, Cisco
Works, MS Terminal Services, APC PowerChute Plus, X Browser,
Dell OpenManage, Compaq Insight Manager, etc...
4) Point out that extending WUG occurs in one of three ways;
modifying the double-click action, adding actions to the
right-click or 'context' menu, or via the COM extensions.
5) The flow of topics could also be improved; it was OK, but
it was missing an overview of the WUG interface, and jumped
back and forth between configuration and monitoring concepts
the entire time.
6) Include some solid HW requirement guidelines (not minimum
recommendations) for monitoring X devices. I know this is a
complex issue, but you guys are the experts, right?
7) Establish some sort of metrics on what to expect in terms of
bandwidth impact during initial discovery vs. continuous
scanning (what protocols are used, size of packets, basic
calculations, etc).
As for what I'd like to see added to the product...
1) Web interface using authentication against AD/NT/LDAP/NIS/etc.
2) Metrics can now be queried via ODBC; why not actually storing
the metrics and maps via ODBC?
3) The reports (performance, outage, response) suffer from bad
fonts and look like crap (sorry, this might be entirely my
personal preference). Consider replacing/supplementing these
with what many of us are doing with MRTG/RRDTool. If Somix
ever removes that ridiculous Apache requirement from Denika
(yes, we all know how to pronounce that now), maybe more of
us will go that route.
4) Make running WUG as a service an easier task, and fix that
bug where it sometimes refuses to stop running (when in its
'service' mode).
5) Allow dependencies between items located in different maps,
without having to create separate objects for the same item
(which can cause double-notifications and other weirdness).
6) Allow right-click menu items to be defined for entire device
types (such as 'browse shares' for all NT Server devices).
7) Give us some useful icons for various common equipment (Cisco,
Dell, Compaq, 3COM, Intel, etc).. The BekArts and CiscoWorks
collections are nice, but somewhat limited, and I don't have
time to import a bunch from Visio, much less create my own.
8) When WUG moves from being a "monitoring" tool to a full
"management" tool, I'll have a million other requests!!
I know several of the other students had ideas on improving both
the course and the product (I may have even 'borrowed' several of
their ideas in this ramble); I'd love to hear feedback from others
who have taken the class!
Jeez, maybe I should spend less time on email, and just go write an
O'Reilly book on Network Management, I mean Systems Monitoring...
whatever. :)
Sincerely,
Eric Osterholm, MCP, MCSA, MCSE (and MCT Soon!)
Senior Consultant, Collective Technologies
Principle Consultant, Dell Professional Services
home: (512) 443-7720 cell: (512) 694-9364
office: (512) 728-6368 efax: (413) 622-8179
website: www.osterholm.org email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Y!: EricOsterholm ICQ: 39640403 -or- 124795824
AIM: OsterholmTX MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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