Eric, Well done..
Although on the second numbering part I highly agree on #1 and #3 and surely #7, but as far as #4 I think the problem is no longer there. I run outside of the box and have WUG setup on a cluster and when I stop the WUG service I know to let the poll finish and the service process will go away. Same as in the GUI. So in my case I never have that problem. Again good job and thanks for the info. I was wondering how the class was going. Tv -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Eric Osterholm Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2003 6:30 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: John Ward; Mary Lawlor; Traci Casparius; Brad Wilkus; David Leonard; Dan Davis; Jem Davis; Mark Hatchett; Michael Carpenter; Dwayne Price Subject: [WhatsUp Forum] Review of WUG Class 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] Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. 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