GeoEngineers is a small business with enterprise demands and a lot of pressure on its network. As an engineering firm with 400 employees located in 12 offices, managing the network presents many unique challenges. For example, its earth science engineers must be able to back up project files and submit data from the field at any time of day and from any location.
Mitchel Weinberger, a systems engineer at GeoEngineers, is responsible for providing 24/7 network uptime. Providing every employee with on-demand access to the files they need, when and where they need it, is vital to business operations.
If the network is not properly managed, the company’s engineers are stuck waiting to access the data they need instead of working productively. As a firm that bills by the hour, GeoEngineers can’t charge clients for time lost waiting for a download or upload. The direct result of poor network performance is less revenue for that period, along with far-reaching cascading effects, such as projects running behind schedule.
Tasked with an important responsibility, Mitchel started exploring different solutions to solve these unique challenges.
Mitchel analyzed his key challenges and narrowed them down to the top two. The first was an inability to identify high bandwidth users or applications. The second top challenge came from having no way to easily monitor server issues, such as CPU and memory consumption.
Both of these challenges created an environment in which employees were unable to reliably access the information they needed.
As a firm with projects in diverse fields, such as oil exploration and environmental cleanup, data was often gathered out in the field and sent back to the office. Network delays hampered the engineers’ work and were a source of frustration.
After due diligence research, Mitchel decided upon WhatsUp Gold network monitoring, along with our Flow Monitor tool to provide real-time monitoring of the network and send bandwidth usage alerts.
WhatsUp Gold provides real-time network monitoring, which, combined with Flow Monitor, easily identifies network issues. Internal issues generate an alert for Mitchel and his team to prevent them from worsening. If there’s an issue with the service provider, Flow Monitor provides the data that can be sent to the ISP to quickly resolve the problem.
Server monitoring, customizable dashboards and filtered alerts let sysadmins receive only pertinent information. Coupled with a custom interface that shows the real-time status of the network and servers, Mitchel now had time to address his core challenges. High bandwidth users or applications had become visually identifiable, combined with meaningful alerts that increased meantime to resolution. And monitoring the status of servers and the network became as simple as opening a dashboard.
When GeoEngineers first setup its offices, the company installed a 50 Mbps line at every location. Knowing the importance of providing all the bandwidth that the engineers would ever need, it seemed at the time to be a sensible decision.
Once Mitchel had WhatsUp Gold and Flow Monitor in action, he noticed that not all GeoEngineers locations needed as much speed as others. While eight offices have teams of 15 to 100 people, four satellite offices only had a few people in each. That allowed Mitchel to decrease the bandwidth in locations that never approached the 50 Mbps limit. That decision reduced monthly operating costs.
To discover the deeper details about the outcomes GeoEngineers experienced, head over to our recording of Mitchel’s recent talk at Ipswitch Innovate Virtual Summit. Mitchel also provides in depth technical details about how Ipswitch solutions addressed GeoEngineer’s needs.
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