Crous Paris Mitigates Network Outages Before Students Notice with Progress WhatsUp Gold

Challenge

In France, the Crous (Centre régional des œuvres universitaires et scolaires) is a type of public institution supervised by the country’s Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation. A Crous’ mission is to provide students with financial aid and accommodation for their social and cultural life and nearly every major city in France has one. The Paris location is one its busiest, serving close to 300,000 students (housing at least 6,000), processing 60,000 scholarships and requiring a staff close to 1,000.

With so many people on campus, Crous Paris would need their network and servers to be in top-notch working condition. However, the IT staff were using an older, insufficient IT infrastructure monitoring solution and were running into various problems. Valuable time each day was being spent chasing down the root causes of network problems, instead of having the proper tool to detect them. IT workers were ignoring crucial projects in order to resolve these problems.

Other issues included a lack of insight into the Paris location’s entire network and an inability to generate an analysis of the servers. If these two issues could be resolved, it would save the IT staff valuable time and improve its efficiency.

Solution

Chaofeng Yu, Director of Information Systems at Crous Paris began looking for a solution. Since he was familiar with Progress® WhatsUp® Gold, he chose it for this project. The integration of the new tool was scheduled to take place over 12 days. In order to align with the availability of each team, this integration process was adapted for rollout on 12 nonconsecutive days over two months.

Implementing WhatsUp Gold, Yu and his colleagues began using the product’s automated network discovery capabilities. The number one goal was to deploy WhatsUp Gold’s automated detection features and finally mitigate the time spent chasing network issues

French Educational Organization Effectively Monitors its Servers and IT Infrastructure

Results

Crous Paris’ IT staff were finally spending their time working on important day-to-day tasks. They gained a greater vantage point into the network and servers of the organization through several ways, one of which including automated detection of those alerts. The other included the morning reports featuring details of both network and servers’ statuses. Through this method of communication, the IT staff team could finally pinpoint and take care of the network outages affecting the lives of students and faculty.

Yu puts his overall experience with WhatsUp Gold straightforwardly as “satisfying”. “My team and I are very satisfied with the WhatsUp Gold solution,” said Yu. “This tool allows us to fix a problem quickly and simply, without having to connect to each server individually in order to locate the malfunction.”

About Crous Paris

The Regional Center for University and School Works (Crous) in Paris is a public service for student life. Its mission is to promote the improvement of the living and study conditions of the students of the Paris Academy. For more information visit www.Crous-paris.fr