WhatsConnected - WhatsUp Gold Plugin

Get a Whole New Perspective on Your IT Network

WhatsConnected is a layer 2 and layer 3 network discovery and visualization plug-in for WhatsUp Gold that equips you with a comprehensive tool set to accurately depict and visualize device connectivity down to the individual port.

Leveraging powerful discovery tools, WhatsConnected locates all devices on the network including critical device connectivity and interdependencies Its unique in-depth technology goes far beyond typical IP discovery and mapping solutions by providing detailed hardware inventory and configuration information.

The Network Manager's Dilema

As networks become simpler to create, they have at the same time become significantly more complex to manage and monitor especially without the tools to document and understand the port-to-port connectivity between devices.

Why is this important?

If you can't understand how devices in your network are connected, their interdependencies, and their locations; how simple can it be to locate problems and resolve them before the impact of a failure is realized? Establishing that device connectivity is not the source of problems is one of the first priorities when troubleshooting network issues.

WhatsConnected provides the key functions network professionals need in order to discover, map, search, inventory and document their physical topology and VMware^© virtualized infrastructures.

As more organizations implement server and application virtualization there is a need to accurately discover, map and document associations between physical and virtualized environments. WhatsConnected provides the essential information to completely understand deployed VMware infrastructure within your datacenter.

Automatically discover, map, and inventory your network assets and port-to-port connectivity

With WhatsConnected you can easily discover, map, inventory and document your entire infrastructure - network devices, servers, deployed software, VMware virtual machines, VLANs and port to port connectivity - quickly and efficiently, in a matter of minutes. Using its powerful auto-discovery and dynamic mapping capabilities and a simple one-click integration with Microsoft® VisioT, your entire team will know exactly what resources are on your network, where they are and how they are connected at all times, even when your network grows, your office moves, or your datacenter resources get consolidated. It just works with no efforts from your part!

Discover

Using a number of innovative discovery technologies WhatsConnected finds all the connected resources on your network and provides detailed physical connectivity, device type, and asset/inventory and configuration information. WhatsConnected leverages layer 2 and layer 3 network technologies, including ARP, SNMP, IP addressing, ICMP, SSH, Virtual Infrastructure Management and LLDP in combination with vendor proprietary mechanisms and SNMP, SSH, WMI, and Telnet to build a complete and accurate picture of your network devices, systems and their interconnections. WhatsConnected supports both on-demand and scheduled discovery tasks. Each execution of discovery dynamically updates your maps without any effort on your part.

Map

Gaining insight into and understanding how your network is put together has never been easier. WhatsConnected simplifies this tedious task with auto-generated topology maps with full visibility into both physical and IP connectivity, including VLAN-specific information and VMware . Maps are fully customizable and allow for any number of different views to be specified. Layer 2 maps generated by WhatsConnected can be directly imported into WhatsUp Gold with a single click.

Search

Quickly search and find out how devices are connected to the network. With detailed device views, you can quickly zero in to find out what’s connected to what. Additionally with built-in tools such as Layer 2 Trace and IP/MAC Finder, WhatsConnected offers a much quicker approach to finding the location and validating connectivity of devices on the network than any other solution.

Document

With highly detailed topology maps now available through WhatsConnected, you also have the option to publish any of these maps through Microsoft® Visio™ with a couple of mouse clicks. Any number of automatically generated maps or custom map views can be exported to provide you with the ability to understand how device additions and design changes have impacted your network over time.

Inventory information on devices gathered during the discovery process can be exported in either CSV or Excel formats to external applications.

WhatsConnected Benefits

Are you still manually mapping and documenting your network and port-to-port connectivity and spending too much time in your wiring closet? Use instead WhatsConnected to automatically discover everything connected to your network -- devices, servers, VMware virtual machines, VLANs and port to port connectivity - quickly, easily and with just one mouse click.

With WhatsConnected you will:

Save Time:
Spend time effectively managing the network instead of wasting it on tedious, time consuming manual documentation tasks of network topology and port to port connectivity.

Lower Cost of Operations:
WhatsConnected best value combined with its ability to free up valuable IT personnel time and lower mean time to repair directly helps lower cost of operations.

Manage Assets and Inventory:
Gather, filter, and export a wide variety of inventory and configuration information across networking devices and systems as required for compliance and network audit process.

Optimize your Hardware Investment
WhatsConnected's Layer 2/3 discovery let's you find "forgotten" hardware or hardware without an IP address. These can then be decommissioned or reassigned to new tasks, or moved to an internal cloud.

Stay in Control:
Know exactly what inventory is deployed on your network, even hard to track associations between physical servers & virtual resources. Understand device interdependencies and how they are affected by changes and failures.

Track Changes:
With scheduled discoveries, and up-to-date dynamic maps, diagrams and topology views you can accurately understand, track and document the evolution of your network, with no effort - it just works.

Simplify Troubleshooting tasks:
Rapidly pinpoint the root cause of connectivity issues to minimize downtime and gain insight into how your network topology and infrastructure can be configured to minimize potential conflicts and optimize performance.

Compliance Support:
Ensure an accurate discovery, audit, documentation and archiving of network assets, topology maps and configurations over time to support regulatory requirements like SOX, FISMA, PCI DSS and HIPAA.

Note: WhatsConnected must be equal or greater than the WhatsUp Gold license.