The alert wizard made it simple to specify notifications; options include playing a tune, sending an e-mail and popping up a notification window. A status icon lives in the system tray and automatically pops up the worst-case device, providing quick insight into problems.
Reports are straightforward as well. The health report shows all the services being monitored for a device; availability pegs the time in which a device or service is up; and the performance report shows a graph indicating if a service or device is moving slow or fast. All the reports are easy to understand, and because they are predefined, work without any setup.
WhatsUp Small Business 2004, $295; annual service included. Ipswitch, (781) 676-5700. www.ipswitch.com
MonitorIT's welcome screen gave us a 15-minute quick-start guide, including a useful summary of steps. This would have had us up and running in 15 minutes ... except that it took about an hour to discover a single class-C subnet, rather than the five to 15 minutes most rivals needed for this task. The disconnect was likely because of MonitorIT running through every discovery for every address in the range; in contrast, other products normally look for SNMP, for example, only if an address responds to ping.
MonitorIT let us select IP-range checking for SNMP and ping, and we could define whether to look for well-known TCP and UDP ports as well as user-defined services. We could target Windows servers using NT and AD domain queries. The process went through each device in the range, displaying success and failure when looking for the selected monitors. This provided an easy audit of devices and services we expected--and didn't expect.
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