When Network Monitoring Saves Four Hours a Day

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from a network administrator at a large electronic invoicing company in Mexico. His company serves large multinational corporations as well as thousands of medium and small clients. His task is to keep Microsoft Exchange up and running at peak performance levels to ensure quick invoice delivery.

However, slowdowns started to become a real problem. And he often didn’t hear about it until 10-15 users got affected by them and started to complain. Then it would take a while to determine the cause, eating up more time than he or the company’s employees could afford.

In his case, it took, on average, a good 4 hours to solve each slowdown.

“Some users were receiving large emails of 10 megabytes or so which caused slowness when downloading,” the manager explains. “Or, if a user’s mailbox was full we had to be able to proactively monitor it and fix it before the employee could send anything to a customer.”

After looking at a few network monitoring products, he selected WhatsUp Gold. He chose it because of its proactive alerts and the ability to monitor different Exchange Server queues with WMI.

As a result, there has been a major reduction of incidents. An alert arrives on his smart phone as soon as a predefined Exchange monitoring threshold is crossed. This buys him time to fix the problem long before it starts to affect many users. Just as important, WhatsUp gold gives him back four hours of his work day so he can work on more important tasks.