Monitor Types
WhatsUp Gold provides active, passive, and performance monitors.
Active Monitoring. Active polling, measurements, and user simulation.
Active monitors typically check for network and device performance, security, and faults by:
- Simulating user activity.
- Actively connecting to or querying device management objects.
Deploying Active Monitors is critical for cases when troubleshooting faulty network traffic or behavior caused by a single device. An obvious Active Monitor example is the FTP monitor, which simulates user activity on a target FTP server.
Passive Monitoring. Monitoring that does not generate network traffic.
Except for record retrieval performed by WhatsUp Gold, these monitors do not generate network traffic or depend on a poller.
- Passive Monitors are useful for troubleshooting cases where the Active Monitor is down or when performing traffic analysis from a specific listening point in your network.
- While passive monitoring is less invasive, you record less information during idle periods.
: In addition to the WhatsUp Gold 'built-in' Passive Monitor types, Network Traffic Analysis provides a router-based variant of passive monitoring. NetFlow monitoring, for example, is router-based passive monitoring. Flow packets, however, do generate a marginal to network traffic. sFlow can limit packet traffic to an optimal rate of sampling.
Performance Monitoring. Historic device availability and resource capacity usage.
These monitors enable you to measure and maintain history of:
- Device and application availability (also known as "up time" metrics).
- Resource capacity utilization. Storage capacity, CPU usage, interface utilization and other resource capacity utilization metrics.
Performance management within WhatsUp Gold leverages an ensemble of monitors that exhibit characteristics of both passive and active monitoring.