When a primary installation of WhatsUp Gold does not work normally, it will automatically switch to a standby installation. A primary system failure can be dealt with automatically through the WhatsUp Gold Failover Manager, which reduces costly downtime. It is also possible to initiate this capability manually by a network administrator during planned outages/maintenance.
Failover Manager uses user-configurable criteria to determine a failed state. You can choose to have the primary system go down if all services are disabled, or if any specified service is disabled. If you select all services, the services used by WhatsUp Gold must go down on the primary system before the secondary system can take over. When you select only the Polling Engine and Web Server, and for whatever reason, both are disabled on the primary system, the secondary system assumes WhatsUp Gold network management duties until the primary system is restored.