A traditional network monitor is its own server: you stand it up, license it, patch it, and watch it alongside your RMM, your security tools, and your compliance work. It does a job worth doing, watching whether the devices on your network are up and healthy, but it is one more box, one more login, and one more thing that goes quiet in the outage you most need it for. Lavawall folds that job into the appliance and the console you already have.
The network monitoring most teams actually use
The Lavawall Sentinel appliance discovers what is on your network and watches it, and everything lands in the Lavawall topology and dashboards beside your other findings.
| What a network monitor does | Lavawall Sentinel |
|---|---|
| Device discovery | Finds the devices on your network and identifies them by type, using SNMP, Bonjour and mDNS, and vendor lookup. |
| SNMP polling | Polls devices for uptime, interfaces, CPU, and health on a schedule, and graphs them. |
| Up or down checks | Watches servers and services and tells you the moment one stops answering. |
| SNMP traps | Receives traps, so a device reports a change immediately instead of waiting for the next poll. |
| Monitored, both ways | Exposes its own SNMP agent so your existing tools can poll the appliance too, with the community string set from the console. |
| One place | Feeds the same Lavawall topology and dashboards as your security, patching, and compliance. No separate monitoring server. |
What a traditional monitor cannot do
It keeps alerting when the internet is down. A network monitor that reports over the same link it is watching goes blind in exactly the outage that matters. When the internet is genuinely down, the Sentinel node relays its critical devices-down alerts over a long-range LoRa radio mesh to a sibling appliance that still has a path out, so the alarm reaches you during the outage rather than the next morning.
It knows the physical room, not just the network. The same appliance watches temperature, humidity, water and flooding, smoke, carbon monoxide, doors, and unauthorized access, so a cooling failure or a flooding closet pages you on the same system. See Lavawall Sentinel for the out-of-band and environmental side.
It is one box, in one console. The monitoring runs on the appliance you already have for out-of-band alerting, and reports into the console you already use, so there is no separate server to license, patch, and watch.
Network monitoring is in limited release
We are onboarding a small number of sites at a time so each deployment gets hands-on attention. Join the waitlist for a spot, help placing the appliance, and early-release pricing.
When WhatsUp Gold is the better choice
WhatsUp Gold is a mature, feature-deep network monitor with years of development behind it. If you need a large, dedicated network management system with its own deep feature set, wireless and flow monitoring, extensive vendor-specific device support, and a team to run it, it is built for that. Lavawall covers the network monitoring most organizations actually use and folds it into one platform, and its edge is the out-of-band alerting and the single console, not matching a specialist NMS feature for feature.
Frequently asked
- Is Lavawall a full network monitor like WhatsUp Gold?
- It does the core work a network monitor does: SNMP discovery and polling for uptime, interfaces, CPU, and health, up or down checks for servers and services, SNMP traps, and its own SNMP agent so your other tools can watch it. WhatsUp Gold is a mature, feature-deep product; Lavawall covers what most teams actually use, in one box, and adds out-of-band radio alerting. Network monitoring is in limited release.
- What does Lavawall do that a traditional network monitor cannot?
- When the internet is down, the moment most monitoring goes blind, a Lavawall appliance relays its critical devices-down alerts over a long-range LoRa radio mesh to a sibling appliance that still has a path out. It also runs in the same console as your security, patching, and compliance, so you are not standing up and paying for a separate monitoring server.
- Is the network monitoring available now?
- It is in limited release: we are onboarding a small number of sites at a time so each deployment gets hands-on attention. Join the waitlist for a spot, deployment guidance, and early-release pricing.