With WhatsUp Professional, you have several options to keep a close watch on the health of and activity on your network. Depending on the service monitors you have installed on your network and configured in the application, WhatsUp Professional communicates with the devices and queries then according to the protcol perscribed by the service being checked.

The default method, and the means to check on the basic availability of your network, is Ping. With Ping (ICMP - Internet Control Method Protocol) a small amount of data is sent from the WhatsUp Professional computer across the network to the device it is watching. If the device is up, it echoes the data back to the WhatsUp Professional computer. If the device is down, it will not send the data back and WhatsUp Professional will consider that device to be down.

The solutions in this section focus on how you can keep a close eye on your network, without having to filter through app-spam.

When thinking about what you are going to monitor, there are a number of things to think about. Things that will keep down the confusion and complexity of what you are looking at, and how often you are contacted with problems. There are several features in WhatsUp Professional that helps you limit useless information and stop unwarranted actions or notifications. Imagine going on vacation right after setting up WhatsUp Professional, only to be woken up early by your IT staff screaming about all of the E-mail, SMS messages, and beeper calls they received since you turned the application on.