If Epson’s EcoTank ET-2830 was a normal inkjet we’d be bemoaning its high price and taking aim at a relatively basic specification. We’ll come back to the latter, but the first is explained by this MFP’s refillable ink tanks. The ET-2830 arrives with about 6,000 pages’ worth of bottled ink – enough to see out a year or two of light use in the home. It’s better value out of the box than a comparable entry-level, cartridge-based device.

And entry-level the ET-2830 is. It’s a three-in-one, able to print, scan and copy, yet there’s no display, no USB port and no memory card slot. Instead, you get a few buttons and LEDs, and a reasonably appealing and uncluttered design. It offers just a single rear paper feed, and a basic scanner with no ADF. The printer can’t flip over pages for double-sided prints, although the driver will help you do it manually.

The ET-2830 arrives with blue tape holding down every conceivable flap. Remove that and it’s time to flip open its ink tanks and empty the supplied black and color inks into the relevant nozzle – they’re physically keyed to prevent a disastrous misfuelling. This is usually the bit where we gripe about waiting for the one-off ink priming to complete, but Epson’s new Smart Panel app lets you join the MFP to a wireless network and get on with installing software while you wait. We found its verbosity annoying, but it worked perfectly and turned out to be a time-saver overall.

Once set up, this MFP offers no real surprises. Despite its basic nature, it will happily get on with regular household or micro-office duties, leaving printed pages in a neat stack. As you might expect, it’s not especially fast, managing only 12.3ppm on our 25-page black text test. However, with the print quality dropped to draft it reached 17.2ppm – significantly more than Epson’s stated 15ppm.

Cheaper inkjets often make a meal of our challenging 24-page colour graphics test, but the ET-2830 chugged along at a steady 4.5ppm – more competitive than it sounds. It wasn’t even that slow when printing larger photos, needing about three minutes for each 10 x 8in shot printed onto A4 paper. Unfortunately, it only offers borderless prints on 10 x 15cm paper, on which it took a beard-lengthening 14 minutes to deliver six prints. Color photocopies provided another opportunity to grow facial hair, with a single copy needing 35 seconds. At least mono copies, at 14 seconds each, were relatively brisk.

The ET-2850’s scanner didn’t hang about at lower resolutions. It completed a preview in 12 seconds, and in the same timeframe could capture an A4 document at 150dpi. At 300dpi, the same job took 22 seconds. Things got slower at middling resolutions, with the scanner needing 37 seconds to capture a 10 x 15cm photo at 600dpi. However, scan speeds remained competitive at 1,200dpi, with the same document needing just less than a minute.

Delightfully, there’s nothing especially entry-level about the quality of this MFP’s prints, scans or copies. Draft text was quite faint, but Normal quality produced crisp and dark results. Colour graphics weren’t the boldest we’ve seen, but they were free of banding, and comfortably good enough for home and internal business use. Photocopies faithfully reproduced the originals – although colour copies were a touch less saturated.

This MFP’s photo prints were a highlight of our tests, combining surprisingly crisp details with vivid colors and realistic skin tones. Only our black and white photo presented a challenge, with the ET-2830 adding a slight green tint and failing to preserve the darkest shade details. We were also very impressed with its scan quality, which combined excellent color accuracy with a wide dynamic range, making the most of office documents and photographs.

The EcoTank ET-2830 may be basic, but it’s not unduly slow, and it does everything well. Yes, it’s missing duplex printing and other helpful features, but it’s about as cheap as refillable inkjets get. Once you’ve used up the generous bundled ink, its ongoing running costs are less than 0.5p per color page. Don’t be fooled by the purchase price: the ET-2830 is a bargain.

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While Canon’s Maxify printers are aimed at home and small offices, the Pixma series is unapologetically focused on creative and home use. The Pixma TS8750 sits near the top of the current lineup; a six-ink MFP offering high-quality photo prints and detailed scanning. What it lacks in office features it makes up for with photo-friendly touches such as the memory card slot and a huge color touchscreen display.

The TS8750 is a striking MFP, made from a mix of textured, shiny and translucent black plastics. Its squat stance makes it look as much like AV equipment as it does a printer. But although it looks as if you could sit the TS8750 on a bookshelf, you’d risk losing access to its scanner and its 100-sheet rear paper tray. The bulk of the MFP is inset slightly from a base that juts out at the front. Here you’ll find a 100-sheet paper cassette and the card slot.

If it’s not immediately obvious where paper comes out, all becomes clear when you start printing. The TS8750’s motorized paper output tray emerges – tilting the front panel upwards – shortly followed by your first page. It’s a slick party piece, partially reversed when you turn the MFP off; the panel itself isn’t motorized, so it stays slightly open.

With manufacturers including Canon making a big push on refillable printers, it almost feels odd to fit the TS8750’s six supplied cartridges. They’re easy to insert and, although you can physically put them in the wrong slots, the printer won’t initialize until it detects everything is ship-shape. This printer augments a standard black, cyan, magenta and yellow setup with grey and a second black cartridge. The three colors, grey and smaller black cartridges all contain dye-based inks, ideal for photo printing, while the main black tank is pigmented for strong black text on plain paper.

The TS8750’s chunky SD card slot might seem to the smartphone generation like a relic, but it makes sense when many high-end cameras still use full-sized SD for storage. Insert a loaded card and the initial single-shot preview isn’t that helpful. You can pull up a multi-frame view through which it’s easier to find specific shots from a selection of snaps, but it won’t let you batch select photos to print.

The TS8750 has two other foibles. There’s a handy lip to help you pull out its main paper cassette, but it’s obscured once the output tray is extended. The paper output tray has a flip-up stop, useful to rein in multiple pages after longer print jobs, but it’s not extended automatically when the tray itself emerges.

We hit the TS8750 with our usual mix of office documents and photos. It wasn’t especially fast, reaching just 13.4ppm over 25 pages of text, and only 3.9ppm on our demanding graphics test. Photo prints were snappier, with borderless 10 x 15cm postcards arriving every 70 seconds or so, although a borderless A4 print inched out over five minutes.

This is a reasonably fast scanner, completing a preview in 12 seconds, and needing 20 seconds to capture an A4 document at 150dpi. At a detailed 1,200dpi it needed 78 seconds to complete a 10 x 15cm photo scan. Copy speeds were middling, with a single page taking 17 seconds in black only or 23 in color.

If we were underwhelmed by this MFP’s speeds, it rose sharply in our estimations once we looked at our results. Black text was as crisp and bold as you’ll get from an inkjet, while color graphics were punchy and consistent, with only the merest hint of banding. Photocopies were very strong, with both mono and color copies preserving the details of the original.

Without doubt, the best results came on glossy photo paper, and from the TS8750’s scanner. Captured images showed a sharp focus with faithful colors and a wide dynamic range that preserved detail from the very lightest and darkest parts of originals. Photo prints were exceptional, offering perfectly reproduced skin tones, vibrant colors and crisp detailing. Unsurprisingly, given the dedicated black and grey inks, black and white prints were rich and free of any color cast.

This isn’t a cheap multifunction in the first place, and with a cost per page upwards of 10p, it won’t prove especially economical in use. That’s particularly true if you’ll often print text, every page of which will set you back a steep 3.5p. However, if you want a smart home MFP that’s as comfortable printing photos as it is scanning artwork, the TS8750 may well prove worth the premium.

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It’s hard to get excited about a laser printer, but Brother’s HL-L9430CDN might just put a hop in an office manager’s step. It’s a big beast, designed for use in small businesses and workgroups, and it comes with a suitable specification. In the base there’s a fully enclosed 520-sheet paper cassette, while the large flap at the front hides a 50-sheet multipurpose feed. Printed pages emerge into a 250-sheet tray on the top.

So far, so standard, but the HL-L9430CDN offers direct control through a large 8.8cm color touchscreen. While many business printers run rather cryptic, unfriendly menus, Brother’s is simple, offering quick access to functions and settings. It’s enhanced with web features, allowing you to access and print from cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and SharePoint. Hidden nearby on the left panel there’s a USB host port for walk-up printing.

The final front panel feature is an NFC reader, used to control access if you need to lock down users or features. Using the printer’s web interface you can block people from printing, using the USB port or accessing web functions, or you can limit the number of pages an individual can print.

It comes with USB and gigabit Ethernet ports. Curiously you can’t buy it off the shelf with a wireless interface, but Brother will sell you one as an option. There’s also a rear USB port for secure printing. Brother offers a range of extra paper trays and a staple finisher, so this printer can grow to match your business’ needs.

Load it up and you’ll see the usual nag about setting the correct paper type. The HL-L9430CDN follows this by asking if you ever want to see the question again – a brilliant timesaver if, like us, you rarely change paper type and it simply gets on your nerves. We were also happy to see clear orientation marks at the front of the main tray and in the center of the multipurpose feed. Too many lasers force you to unload the paper just to see how to orientate the stack; a pain if you’re re-using previously printed pages, or using single-sided media.

Start printing and it’s clear that this is a very rapid device. However, if it’s been idle for any length of time the warm-up period can be toe-tappingly long. After an hour of rest we timed a first black text page out in 25 seconds, but the first color page of the day took nearly a minute and a half.

This pause aside, the HL-L9430CDN made mincemeat of our tests. It reached 30.6ppm when printing 25 text pages, and managed 34.9ppm on our 50-page document. Both fall a way short of the stated 44ppm engine speed, but our tests include the time taken to spool and send the job. Discount this and it was almost bang on target.

Like all printers, the HL-L9430CDN was slower when printing our challenging color graphics test. Here it reached 21.8ppm, the fastest color result in this test, and not far behind the 27.7ppm mono result recorded by Kyocera’s P2235dn. At the best Fine print quality it delivered two 10 x 8in photos on A4 paper in only 22 seconds, and six 10 x 15cm prints on three A4 sheets in 21 seconds. It duplexed ten sides onto five sheets at a rate of 14ipm.

So often, a promising color laser is torpedoed by high running costs, but happily that’s not the case here. The HL-L9430CDN is complex, requiring four toners, a drum, a waste bottle and transfer belt, but even factoring in all these it costs 0.9p per black page or 6.1p in color. This printer arrives with generous 9,000-page black and 6,500-page color inbox toners. With the largest replacements good for 12,000 black or 9,000 color pages, maintenance intervals shouldn’t be too frequent.

While not offering perfect color reproduction, the HL-L9430CDN still made a good job of our test photos, and printed excellent color graphics with a pleasing luster.

Black text was as good as you’d expect, too. Overall we could hardly call this hulking laser exciting, but it delivers everything you need in a busy business printer. And with Brother having won our Best Printer Manufacturer award for ten years in a row, you can expect great reliability and support, too.

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Want a pretty OS? Look no further. Zorin comes as close as any operating system to rivalling Windows 11’s featherweight fluid design. We’re testing the free Zorin OS Core, but there are alternatives for older computers (Zorin OS Lite) and professional users (Zorin OS Pro).

Lite switches the highly customized Gnome 43 desktop environment for Xfce, while Pro, which costs £39 exc VAT, bundles installation support and additional software for image editing, 3D graphics, video editing, note taking and more. Pro can be installed on multiple computers with a single license, unless you’re a business or education user, in which case you’ll need a license for each machine.

Whichever version you choose, Zorin is based on Ubuntu, with the latest build running on the 6.2 kernel. Support runs until at least April 2027.

Linux Mint is often touted as the best Linux for Windows switchers, and certainly it takes very little time to become comfortable with its Cinnamon desktop. However, for our money, Zorin is better yet. The default UI has the taskbar and Start-style menu of both Windows and Mint, and the color scheme is immediately familiar. It’s supplemented by three other themes, with one adopting the traditional Gnome shell and another optimized for touch – and, if you upgrade to Zorin Pro, you get additional desktop styles, including more explicit Windows 11, macOS, Chromebook and Gnome 2 options.

You may be able to bring some of your Windows apps with you, with optional Windows App Support, which uses Wine and its graphical front end, PlayOnLinux. However, you can install these yourself on other distros (and Nitrix has it built in, in the form of Bottles), so they’re not a reason to choose Zorin in their own right – and Windows application support isn’t 100%, so don’t expect to be able to run everything you rely on today. That said, the one-click setup may well make this implementation a tempting one for less confident switchers.

Zorin introduced an upgrader with version 16.3, which was simultaneously rolled out to existing version 15 installations. This preserves your files, apps and settings when you make a full-point upgrade. Previously, such upgrades required a clean start and manual migration. It sits alongside a carefully curated selection of default software. LibreOffice 7.6.3 is preinstalled, but GIMP isn’t. The default browser is Firefox, and for email it’s Evolution. This is a good-looking alternative to Thunderbird, but with the latter receiving a significant brush-up in its 115 release, we’re inclined to switch, simply so we can run the same client on both Linux and Windows.

Both the Core and Pro builds include Zorin Connect, which maintains an encrypted local-network connection between your computer and an Android phone. You can sync notifications, share files, and control music and video playback across devices. You can also use it to turn your phone into a remote keyboard and mouse, or a controller for PC-based presentations. If you want the same features in an alternative distribution, check out KDE Connect (kdeconnect.kde.org).

You can download anything that’s not preinstalled from the integrated app store, which is set up to use Zorin and Ubuntu repositories, Flathub and Snap Store. This all makes for a friction-free environment for Linux newbies, and we were pleased to see that both printers on our network were recognized on first boot.

If you’re new to Linux and nervous about switching, then, Zorin could be just the distribution you’ve been searching for. It looks great, feels immediately familiar (even if you don’t pay for the Windows 11-style UI of Zorin Pro) and goes to significant lengths to simplify working with your mobile – so long as it’s running Android – and integrating (some) Windows applications. It feels like the best Linux distro for Windows switchers who want to quickly feel at home.

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WatchGuard’s family of Firebox security appliances offers an unbeatable range of desktop solutions, and the T45-CW brings 5G failover to the table. Ideal for businesses that need always-on internet access for remote sites, its multi-WAN features combine wired and 5G mobile connections in a single policy so if one goes down, the other seamlessly steps in and takes over.

The T45-CW’s quad-core 1.6GHz NXP CPU claims a high raw firewall throughput of 3.94Gbits/sec and 557Mbits/sec with all UTM services enabled. It has five gigabit ports for WAN, LAN plus DMZ duties and, unlike many table-top security appliances, it offers secure Wi-Fi 6 services.

The appliance delivers a wealth of security features, and it’s easy to choose the right subscription as WatchGuard offers two options. A Basic Security Suite subscription enables gateway antivirus, anti-spam, web filtering, HTTPS inspection, IPS, application controls, WatchGuard’s RED (reputation enabled defense) cloud-based URL filtering and network discovery.

We’ve shown the price for a three-year Total Security Suite subscription, which adds WatchGuard’s advanced persistent threat (APT) blocker with cloud sandboxing, DNSWatch for monitoring client DNS requests and blocking access to known malicious domains, IntelligentAV anti-malware services and ThreatSync XDR, which provides policy-based collection, correlation and automated responses for Firebox threat events.

Local management is simple. The web console runs a wizard to enable wired internet access, activate a basic security policy and create a wireless SSID. Our unit came with a Vodafone 5G SIM and, after enabling the internal modem, the SIM came online.

WatchGuard includes four SMA external aerials; LEDs on the front panel show the cellular signal strength, failover status and whether you have a 4G LTE or 5G connection. Configuring failover is a cinch: you use the multi-WAN feature to define primary and backup connections and decide how failback is handled.

In practice, it works perfectly. We set up a continuous ping to an external website and then pulled the wired internet cable. We saw a single ping timeout, after which it continued unabated, and when we plugged the WAN cable in again, the appliance swapped back to it without any ping timeouts being recorded.

Naturally, you can use 5G as your primary connection, and defining the modem as an external interface means all your security policies will be automatically applied to it. In fact, you can have both wired and 5G internet connections active and use multi-WAN round-robin weightings to determine how connections are distributed across them.

For cloud management, we registered the appliance with our support account, allocated it to our site and chose the management and monitoring option. After reconfiguration, the T45-CW disables its local web interface, takes further settings from the cloud and provisions full access for remote configuration.

All security functions are easily accessible. From the portal’s content scanning page, you use a simple slider bar to enable the gateway AV, IntelligentAV, APT blocker and spamBlocker services. Anti-spam policies are available for SMTP, IMAP or POP3 traffic, where you allow, deny or tag spam messages in their subject line for ongoing local rule processing.

From the network blocking section, you can control botnet detection, IPS, custom blocked URLs and ports plus detection of Tor (The onion router) exit points. Web content filtering offers 130 URL categories for blocking or allowing, while WatchGuard’s application control service presents over 1,250 predefined app signatures.

The multi-WAN function is found in the device’s networks page where you select the Global WAN option, choose failover or round-robin operations and set the failback mode. Move to the portal’s monitoring page and you can see the status and strength of the 5G connection and view RSRP and RSRQ graphs.

Businesses that hate internet downtime will love WatchGuard’s Firebox T45-CW. It provides a wealth of top-class security services, can be easily cloud managed and delivers seamless 5G WAN failover.

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Debian-based Ubuntu is the jumping-off point for many other distributions, including Linux Mint and Zorin OS. The Desktop edition is available in at least two builds: the so-called LTS (Long Term Support) build, which receives support for a minimum of five years from release, and the bleeding-edge release, which comes with nine months of security and maintenance updates. In each case, the build number – 23.10 in the case of this review – denotes the year and month of release, so 23.10 will enjoy support until July 2024, and 22.04 LTS until April 2027. New releases appear every six months for the cutting-edge build, and every other year for the LTS edition.

Both 23.10 and 22.04.3 LTS require 4GB of memory, 25GB of drive space and a 2GHz dual-core processor, despite running on different kernels (6.5 versus 5.17) and desktop environments (Gnome 45 versus Gnome 41/42). Build 23.10 is also running more up-to-date versions of its default applications, Firefox, LibreOffice and Thunderbird. Of these, perhaps the most significant is Thunderbird, which sits at 91 in the LTS release and at 115.2 in 23.10. Thunderbird 115 introduced significant interface improvements and, even if you install the LTS release, we’d recommend updating Thunderbird to at least 115 yourself.

As well as the desktop edition, there are builds for server and IoT platforms, with the latter including Raspberry Pi. The Pi edition is available directly through the Raspberry Pi Imager. There’s also an immutable build, in which the core system files are protected against tampering.

None of the installer’s questions is too taxing. You don’t need to know what kind of security your network uses, as you do for openSUSE, and we didn’t need to play around with the partitioning of our drive to complete the process successfully.

Once up and running, you’re presented with a largely vanilla workspace. Although Ubuntu has its own style, it remains fairly faithful to Gnome’s default look and feel, rather than making a significant departure as Zorin does (or as Nitrux does from KDE Plasma). If you don’t like Gnome, you’ll find alternative builds with a little searching. Kubuntu (kubuntu. org) switches it out for KDE, while Ubuntu Budgie (ubuntubudgie.org) and Ubuntu Cinnamon (ubuntucinnamon.org) naturally use Budgie and Cinnamon respectively. Lubuntu (lubuntu.me), using Qt, and Xubuntu (xubuntu.org), using Xfce, are both Ubuntu-recognized ports for lower powered computers.

Apps can be installed using the built-in App Center or via the Terminal using apt. The App Center, which gives access to both Debian and Snap packages, has been upgraded in 23.10, and certainly feels more engaging than the installer it replaced. There’s a handy “Jump start your desktop” at the top of the homepage that gives direct access to the most commonly installed apps, rather like the recommended software section in Raspberry Pi OS. Other named sections, including a Productivity section, make it easy to find essentials such as alternative browsers, Bitwarden and Slack. Neither Inkscape nor GIMP are preinstalled, but the versions available through App Center match the latest-edition version numbers available from their respective sites.

More good news? On first boot, both of the wireless printers on our network were successfully recognized and set up.

For many newcomers, Ubuntu may well be a byword for Linux, and it’s easy to see why. Installation is a breeze and, once complete, it just works. The new features in this latest release, including the updated App Center and Gnome 45, are subtle but welcome improvements over their predecessors, and the default interface is unflashy and provides few distractions.

Ubuntu was our Labs Winner last time around, and nothing changes here – so long as you’re happy running Gnome. If you aren’t, take a look at KDE-based openSUSE Tumbleweed or Cinnamon-based Linux Mint.

It’s not difficult to find an Ubuntu-based distribution running KDE, Budgie and several other desktop managers, although, as they’re not directly controlled by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu itself, it’s fairer to consider them different products.

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Rocky Linux is one of the youngest distributions around, first appearing in mid-2021. It’s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so in some ways is a natural home for anyone previously running CentOS, a community-supported version of Red Hat terminated in December 2020.

Rocky’s first release was version 8.3, reflecting the fact that it was based on the same version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The version-8 line remains current, despite 8.9 appearing two days after 9.3, which itself is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3. That’s the version we’re testing here. Planned end of life for the Rocky 9 line is May 2032. For Rocky 8, it’s May 2029.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses Fedora source code in its development, so Fedora and Rocky naturally share several touch points. However, where Fedora 39 is built on the 6.6.3 kernel, Rocky Linux 9.3 is built on the same 5.14 Linux kernel as Red Hat 9.3. While this may look outdated, it shouldn’t be an issue, as Red Hat uses a system known as backporting to implement fixes and features within the existing kernel while maintaining compatibility with overlaying applications.

Installation is straightforward. There’s no media builder as there is for Fedora, so it’s a case of downloading the ISO and using balenaEtcher or similar to write it to a bootable thumb drive. The full DVD ISO is a hefty beast, tipping the scales at 9GB. However, there are lighter “boot” and “minimal” builds that can be used to enter rescue mode and install the OS from an alternative source, like an online repository. There are four processor builds, covering x86_64, ARM, PowerPC and IBM s390x servers (although only the first two of these are available for Rocky 8). Dig deeper and you’ll find a build specific to Raspberry Pi in the alternative images library.

Although Gnome is the default window manager, you can swap it out for KDE, Xfce, Mate or Cinnamon.

We opted for the DVD ISO and, once up and running, were dropped into Gnome 40.4, which feels dated if you’re accustomed to Gnome 45. Aside from the operating system, we didn’t have much to show for our 9GB download. Firefox was pre-installed, but there was no email client, office suite or image editor. These are all available through the Software app, and we were glad to see that the version of Thunderbird available through the repository was 115 (which benefits from a significant redesign). However, LibreOffice, had we chosen to install it through the default repository, would have been version 7.1 (the latest build is 7.6), GIMP was one point behind the latest build, and Inkscape was at 1.1.1, while its latest stable release is 1.3.2.

Further hurdles: the two printers on our network hadn’t been recognized upon first booting and updating the system, and we needed to enter their IP addresses in the printer setup dialog to add them to the OS.

Less rocky was this distribution’s turn of pace. Rocky Linux 9.3 returned a respectable 1,097 in the single-core Geekbench test and 3,112 in the multicore test. Despite the different kernels, this was broadly similar to the scores we saw when testing under Fedora, which turned in 1,105 and 3,053 respectively. In either case, we would be surprised if this made a noticeable difference in day-to-day use.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that our verdict is so similar to that for Fedora, which was our runner-up to Ubuntu. They are, after all, the bread in a Red Hat sandwich, sitting at either end of the development chain. If you don’t want to run a Debian-based OS, either would be an excellent choice, being well supported and closely aligned to one of the pre-eminent commercial Linux distributions.

Of the two, we would opt for Fedora. There are three reasons why. First, it got us up and running more quickly. Second, for bundling Gnome 45. And third, for including a wider range of pre-installed default applications, each running a recent build.

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Progress Software has been busy developing its flagship network-monitoring software, and WhatsUp Gold (WUG) 2023.1 introduces a raft of new features with ease of use given a high priority. Previously, you had to manually enable monitoring for every device, but you can now set a network discovery scan job to do this for you.

What’s more, the discovery process automatically collects SNMP and WMI device attributes and updates them in real-time, while WUG’s dynamic SNMP table monitor populates every instance, making it easier to monitor specific devices. The device properties page clearly shows which credentials are being used, access security has been tightened up with TLS 1.3 support, and SQL Server Express 2022 is now the default database.

Licensing is even more flexible. Along with the standard versions, perpetual licenses and points-based options, Progress has added three yearly subscription plans. The Business edition starts at around £715 per year for 50 devices and, unlike sensor- or element-based products, WUG doesn’t care how many CPUs are in a host or the number of ports a switch has.

This edition supports 1,000 devices and includes core functions such as network discovery, topology mapping, alerting and reporting, as well as cloud, wireless network and storage monitoring. The Enterprise edition has unlimited device support and enables virtualization host and application monitoring plus log management, while Enterprise Plus adds network traffic analysis and configuration management for switches, routers and firewalls.

Installation on a Windows Server 2019 host took around 30 minutes, and discovery is swift. A wizard helped conjure up the first scan and, after we’d added all our device credentials, it took ten minutes to deliver a complete list of all our network devices.

The WUG console is easy to use. It presents four menu options in its upper ribbon bar, and you can add frequently used views to the Favorites tab by clicking on the star icon at the top right of the console. It’s simple to create custom network discoveries, and you can pull up network topology views and maps.

Analysis dashboards are a great feature that allow you to design multiple custom views, add columns and choose the metrics you want to see. Anything WUG is capable of monitoring can be included, so you can create very detailed dashboards, and each device is assigned a colored icon for instant status views.

The new network operations center (NOC) feature manages collections of views that rotate to a schedule for presenting support teams with a big heads-up live status display. To create them, you click the same star icon, choose the NOC option, add items to a slide deck, enter a display duration in seconds and pass the URL to support staff so they can access it directly.

Alert policies link device state changes with an extensive range of actions including running a program, restarting a service, sending emails and posting alert messages to Microsoft Teams users. The Alert Center presents even more information about disk utilization, and the device properties page has been updated so you can see which actions have been applied to it.

WUG is a great choice for businesses running the Progress Flowmon appliances as it can monitor them and include their traffic analysis in its dashboards. General reporting tools are in abundance, too, and they can now be emailed in HTML format so nontechnical users can appreciate them.

WhatsUp Gold 2023.1 is simple to deploy and offers an impressive range of network-monitoring tools. The choice of licensing plans makes it an affordable option for SMBs, and support teams will love its smart dashboard and NOC views.

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