Take Your Turn

Servers, networks and applications aren’t the only remote devices that some companies need to manage. Did you know WhatsUp Gold can also monitor point-of-sale devices such as vending machines, in-store video games and ticket turnstiles? In fact, any device that supports ping, SNMP or WMI management protocols.

This is my lead-in for today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring that comes to us from a network administrator who works at a big theme park company based in France.

He was tired of managing crises related to malfunctioning turnstiles. Any time a turnstile didn’t work, lines backed up, customers grew unhappy, and confusion rippled through the crowds waiting to get in. The last straw for our customer was when a frustrated park manager emailed him a video of children crying because they couldn’t get in right away.

The turnstiles were supposed to be “self-managing” but their built-in reporting required a separate dashboard and alerts that were hard to adjust and investigate. There just wasn’t enough IT staff to dedicate someone to monitor the turnstiles and learn all the intricacies of the alerts. When turnstiles don't work, customers either turn on you, or turn away.

After using WhatsUp Gold for two weeks, the network admin convinced his boss that he’d found the solution that would not only monitor their network and servers, but also remotely monitor the IP-connected entry turnstiles using SNMP.

Now both the centralized IT team and onsite engineers get an alert immediately when a turnstile’s performance has dropped below a threshold, and the network administrator can trace the root cause from the same dashboard he uses for any other network issue.

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what our customer had to say: “WhatsUp is extremely simple to use, very reliable and has become essential to our day-to-day infrastructure management. I would highly recommend it.”

Now it's your turn.