WhatsUp Gold Engineer’s Toolkit

The folks at Ipswitch released their WhatsUp Gold Engineer’s Toolkit this week. I was in the beta for the past month and find it a pretty handy ‘kit.

What I hadn’t realized was that they’d be giving it away for free when launched. Nice!

So hey, if you do any network work go get yourself a copy. It won’t replace any single specialized tool (like nmap) but it certainly bundles a lot of functionality in one application.

Here’s what you get:

• Design & Planning
  • Subnet Calculator
• Discovery
  • Ping Sweep
  • Port Scanner
  • MAC Address Discovery
• Diagnostics
  • Ping
  • Trace Route
  • WAN Load Generator
  • Spam Blacklist
  • SNMP Grapher
• DNS Verification
  • DNS Audit
  • DNS & Whois Resolver
  • DNS Analyzer
• Remote Control
  • Wake On LAN
  • Remote TCP Session Reset

Each tool opens up in a separate tab so you can have multiple things going at the same time which is handy.

As a network engineer, at least part of your average workday is spent diagnosing and troubleshooting existing problems or investigating issues that could cause new problems. These activities often involve the tedious process of accessing individual network elements to gather information on device or subnet configuration and availability; interpreting that data; and then accessing the same elements again to provision or configure devices and services.

Most of the time you don’t need a powerhouse application to support these activities. In fact, many network engineers use a mix of tools they’ve cobbled together and then rely on brainpower and intuition to make up the difference.  Although this strategy works, there is an easier way to get the job done.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Fun With WhatsUp and PsService.exe
2. Tip on vmnetcfg