How WhatsUp Gold Keeps Hattiesburg Clinic Network Running Smooth

How WhatsUp Gold Keeps Hattiesburg Clinic Network Running Smooth

The Challenge

In earlier days, Hattiesburg Clinic bought Uni-Center from Computer Associates (now CA). “We tried to get that to work and never could. Uni-Center was so overly complex and hard to install. I don’t remember how far down the road we got with it. It wasn’t very far. We just finally ditched that and went with WhatsUp Gold,” said Chuck Holcomb with the Hattiesburg Clinic.

 

The clinic’s main need was understanding exactly what was happening on the network. “With our network hardware, you didn’t know if it was up or down, or how the servers were performing. We were looking to get some insight, not anything in depth at that time, some insight into disk usage, CPU usage, memory, and network uptime and response times,” Holcomb recalled. “It’s really embarrassing to be the network administrator and have end users call you and tell you your stuff is down. You want to be more proactive than reactive. You should be contacting them and saying, ‘We see an issue. Are you seeing the same kind of issue? What’s going on?’”

The Solution

Rather than continue to struggle with the complex and expensive Uni-Center, Hattiesburg went with a simpler, less expensive solution and moved to WhatsUp Gold, and have been happy ever since. WhatsUp Gold was easy from the start. “It was a simple install and setup. It remains the same. We’ve gone through many upgrades over the years, and they’ve all been seamless. Adding equipment hasn’t changed much. It’s not overly complicated, which is one of the great things about it,” Holcomb explained.

Today WhatsUp Gold continues to supervise the clinic’s growing network. “We have about 50 locations scattered throughout south Mississippi. We do everything from podiatry to neurosurgery. We have some small clinics, some dialysis units that will have 10 to 20 devices, and some family clinics that have a hundred, 150 devices or more,” Holcomb said.

WhatsUp Gold examines the gamut, from large devices to small, seemingly insignificant items. “WhatsUp Gold looks at just about everything. We’re monitoring all our servers, network gear, switches, access points, routers, the VPN, and firewalls. We’re monitoring all our UPS’s. We’re even monitoring our time clocks,” Holcomb said. “We recently migrated over to new time clocks and a new HR system. We got a lot of calls that the time clocks were not working. We decided to monitor them with WhatsUp Gold, so we’ll know if they’re up or if they’re down.”

Holcomb basically lives in his WhatsUp Gold dashboard. “I am looking at disk utilization, completely down devices, ping response time, memory utilization, down active monitors, and I’ve got a couple of graphs monitoring our outside connections. Right now, we have 983 devices we’re monitoring,” he said.

Summary

The Hattiesburg Clinic in South Mississippi has its hands full taking care of over 500,000 Mississippians facing an array of health challenges. With such a burden, the last thing the sprawling clinic needs is a big dose of network problems. Thanks to WhatsUp Gold from Progress, the network serving more than 300 physicians and providers and some 2,000 staffers is the least of the clinic’s worries. To learn more visit https://www.hattiesburgclinic.com/

 

 

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