Except for record retrieval performed by WhatsUp Gold, these monitors do not generate network traffic or depend on a poller.

  • Passive Monitors are useful for troubleshooting cases where the Active Monitor is down or when performing traffic analysis from a specific listening point in your network.
  • While passive monitoring is less invasive, you record less information during idle periods.
Tip: In addition to the WhatsUp Gold 'built-in' Passive Monitor types, Network Traffic Analysis provides a router-based variant of passive monitoring. NetFlow monitoring, for example, is router-based passive monitoring. Flow packets, however, do generate a marginal amount of network traffic. Using sFlow sources with Network Traffic Analysis can limit this packet traffic to an optimal rate of sampling.