Fit Default Roles with Custom Monitors

This topic shows you the best and shortest path to leverage WhatsUp Gold Device Roles and Sub Roles. When you extend your "default roles" (roles that ship with WhatsUp Gold), consider the following:

Understand the 'functional category' approach. Default roles use scan rule sets that identify all devices of a functional category (for example: server, bridge, firewall, printer, UPS, ...).
Add vendor-specific monitors. While Discovery catches all devices within a particular functional category, vendor-specific monitors enable Discovery to sift through the functional category matches and apply vendor-targeted monitoring capability.
Don't change default scan rules. Leaving functional category scan rules in place enables you to catch the rest of your devices (you can always apply vendor-specific monitoring to these at a later time).

Recognize Role Candidates with Generalized Scan Rules + Validate with "Custom" (Vendor-specific) Monitor Definitions

From within a WhatsUp Gold Sub Role definition, it is easy to take a default device role and extend it to be vendor-specific. To do this, simply add vendor-specific monitors to the default role's monitoring list. In practice, given the appropriate scan credentials, this customization enables WhatsUp Gold to harvest more candidates for discovery while enhancing the information returned from the device and the range and scope of monitoring applied.

Most importantly, this approach enables you to keep your scan rules simple. It allows you to keep customizations and future tweaks isolated within the vendor-specific monitor configurations (rather than the WhatsUp Gold scan rules and device role).

About default roles

Several default device roles cast a wide-net, platform-agnostic approach by identifying devices and applying monitors based on their functional category. To extend this capability to be vendor specific, you can create and add and curate candidate monitor lists that reflect your site's reliability objectives and adapt to environments with mixed protocols, hardware, and software vendors. This is possible because WhatsUp Gold applies these monitors to the current device only when Discovery can determine they are appropriate and supported by the device's current configuration.

Tip: Ensure you have the necessary credentials in the credential list for your scan. This example leverages how the Discovery process only applies monitors when they are appropriate to the current device.

Example: Extend default roles with vendor-specific monitoring

The following visual shows a default sub role that was extended. It was extended using active monitors created with the Monitoring Library (shown in underline in the Monitors list —TrippLite UPS, Liebert Micro UPS, ...). The active monitors were built to be vendor-specific using the SNMP Extended monitoring type (not shown). When you extend a default sub role in WhatsUp Gold the Source category changes from System to Modified.

This example adds vendor-specific monitoring to default roles.

Step 1: Pick a default role or sub role to extend.	Consider the following: The scan rules should be generalized enough to detect (and not exclude) devices of varying vendor types. Unlike creating Custom roles, you should not modify the scan rules (after all, it's unneeded).
Step 2: Add custom monitor lists. (with Check Support First selected)	Consider the following: SNMP Extended and WMI Formatted active monitors enable you to group management objects. They provide a nice way to build vendor-specific monitors based on management objects observed at the device, grouped by severity and service level priority. SNMP Extended and WMI Formatted active monitors (and many others) provide MIB or management object browsers that enable you to browse the objects on the device or type of device you want to monitor. Within the role/sub role where you include them, monitors should have the Check Support First option selected. (This enables monitors to be applied only if Discovery can check that monitoring properties are supported by the device).
Step 3: Enable the role.	Enable the role within the Role and Sub Role Library.
Step 4: Discover.	Run a discovery scan or rescan to test that vendor specific monitors are applied as part of your modified default role definition.