Integrating WhatsUp Gold and Skylight for application performance alerting

By integrating Skylight data into WhatsUp Gold, you can monitor network and application performance through the same solution as the availability and resource consumption of your IT infrastructure. Our distributor in Singapore, AsiaVAD, was nice enough to write up the following about the possibilities that such an integration entails.

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Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold is a popular network, server, and application monitoring solution. It supports a number of monitoring protocols such as SNMP, WMI, Service Running Check, Network Port, offers scripting support, and provides disk/memory utilization monitoring for a wide range of devices include routers, switches, firewall, servers of various operating system flavors, and application servers.

Skylight is a network-based application performance monitoring (APM) solution that is specialized in monitoring end-user response time (EURT) across various application servers and network zones and providing analysis of network behaviors.  It complements WhatsUp Gold by providing a global view of infrastructure as well as application performance and utilization. By capturing traffic flows at strategic points in your network, Skylight measures end-user Quality of Experience (QoE), as well as all network traffic and transactions.

Both products complement each other, as described in the scenarios below.

1. Alerting of business-critical application performance event occurrence

While Skylight is able to graph the response time, such as End User Response Time (EURT) for specific applications, it doesn’t have a built-in threshold exceed alerts. With the availability of business-critical applications (BCA) values in SNMP responses, WhatsUp Gold can do SNMP polling to collect the BCA values, and set the threshold exceed alerts by its versatile action such as email and SMS.

Below is the screen capture of BCA values graphed in WhatsUp Gold.

And the threshold alerts, configurable from WhatsUp Gold.

2. Skylight system health

A system administrator can configure WhatsUp Gold to monitor Skylight’s system health status in terms of its CPU utilization, disk space, and ping connectivity status.

3. Complementing WhatsUp Gold

WhatsUp Gold delivers performance monitoring from a WhatsUp machine perspective. Due to this approach, it may miss out response time status from the perspective of another client in a different network zone. Skylight, which performs 100% network based inspection, is able to analyze the application response time from the perspective of all network zones relative to a group of application servers. It’s therefore useful for the measurement of application response time such as:

1. Measurement of user experience for a given set of applications when users access them from different network zones
2. Before and after migrating an application server from one platform to the other (e.g., virtualization)
3. Applications hosted in the Cloud

Skylight doesn’t check the same items (e.g., Application Logic Down status, Application Error Detection) that WhatsUp Gold does.

For more information or a complete set of instructions for integrating both solutions, please contact us.

To discover how Skylight can complement your SNMP monitoring solution, please read our White Paper on Taking IT Monitoring Beyond the Limits of SNMP