Tag: Case Study

Colleges and Universities ace the network performance and security test with network monitoring.

Network visibility key to financial cyber security, keeping data safe and the network responsive.

When the new IT director for a major transportation company walked through the door on his first day, he knew in advance the big network monitoring headache he faced. He was joining a fast-growing company that supplies cargo containers used by ships, trains and trucks. To keep the containers moving, the 12-person IT team maintains a network of virtual and physical servers & desktops, spanning 12 locations, using more than 90 network devices, with about 150 active monitors and passive (SNMP trap) monitors.

Dennis Hoshield, Network Infrastructure Engineer at Wayne State University, discusses his positive experience using the new and revamped WhatsUp Gold 2017 Plus.

Wireless networks have become a requirement for most K-12 schools, and that presents a challenge for IT teams who need to maintain consistent access and performance for students and teachers alike.

Most IT teams don’t have the budget or resources to satisfy the growing demands of their users. The demand comes in many forms, such as bandwidth consumption, Wi-Fi access, power utilization, and storage capacity; just to name a few.

CROUS Paris provides education and housing services to more than 300,000 students over 80 locations in France. Each year, its 750 employees prepare five million meals, find housing for 6,000 students and process 60,000 scholarship applications. In order to support such a high volume of activity on a network with more than 1000 different IT devices, Mr. Yu, Information Systems Director at CROUS Paris, needed an infrastructure monitoring solution.

Auditing network inventory can be time-consuming and tedious. It’s only amplified for organizations with an IT environment that spans across multiple locations. Making matters worse, manual inventories lead to outdated information and issues with compliance audits. But don't just take our word for it.

Two regional auto parts companies merged to increase their competitiveness with national chains. But they almost immediately ran into an unexpected network monitoring problem. The IT manager tasked with consolidating the two companies’ network infrastructures found that neither company’s network monitoring products had Layer 2 and Layer 3 discovery capabilities. This would give them enough detail to determine what devices to keep and which to upgrade and force them to spend more than they had budgeted for the project.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from Joe, a network administrator from an electronics company that was growing fast. When he started his new job he was surprised to find that the company  used what he called a “primitive” system for communication between the help desk and the IT operations network monitoring team.

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.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network monitoring comes to us from Edgar, a systems administrator at a bank in Northern Europe. Edgar has been at the bank long enough to know the systems inside and out, but his expertise was challenged each time the bank acquired a smaller bank or merged with a rival. The new banks had different systems and plenty of custom applications.    

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.

Today’s tale from the front lines of network management comes to us from a company that’s been in business for eleven decades. They’re a logistics company with offices around the U.S. And they literally started with a horse and a cart. They have bought several companies along the way, keep their eyes on the future, and learned the value of technologies that help them grow.

In the words of Victor Kennedy, Director of Talladega County 9-1-1, “Networks don’t get more mission-critical than emergency communications.”

Maintaining a work-life balance is extremely difficult for some – especially network managers who are on-call 24/7. A great article titled Mobile Network Management Smartphone Apps for On-the-Go Engineers on SearchNetworking.com got us thinking about all the ways network management software for smartphones and tablets helps make network managers’ lives easier and achieve that work-life balance we all try so hard to maintain.