Rules to Better WhatsUp Gold - 2 Rules
Optimize your monitoring strategy with these key rules for WhatsUp Gold, focusing on crucial aspects like failed login attempts and daily server uptime checks. These practices will help ensure your systems remain secure and operational.
It is important to monitor failed login attempts to determine if you are being attacked from an external source or are having failed attempts from users within your organization. This can be achieved with Passive Whats Up Gold Monitor.
Figure: This Passive Monitor can then be applied to your Servers 
Figure: Good example - This Passive Monitor will then record failed login attempts It is important to also ensure that you have "Audit logon events" Group Policy applied to servers for source information on the login.
See: Do you use Group Policy to enable auditing of logon attempts?
It is important that the system administrator can easily find out how reliable his servers are. This can be achieved using tools like What's Up Gold (WUG) https://www.whatsupgold.com to monitor many statistics e.g.:
- Uptime - Ping, Interface monitor
- Performance - RAM usage, CPU usage
- Network - Bandwidth, Interface throughput
- Storage - Disk usage, health
For example, here is a report in WhatsUp Gold you can use to monitor servers on a daily basis.
Figure: Good example - WhatsUp Gold - Green indicates servers are healthy Another option is to use WUG's built-in email alerts, which can be formatted in HTML or plain text. You can also add variables that change based on the current state of devices and other stats.
Figure: OK Example - Editing WUG's email action is simple, but HTML skills are necessary to make a good looking report The best option is to use SQL Reporting Services to create a custom report that can be emailed via a data-driven subscription, which sends a nicely formatted email when there's a problem.
Figure: Good example - Email - Nicely branded email, red indicates servers are not healthy
