Pony Express was seeking for a solution to monitor state and performance of more than 70 business-critical Windows-based and FreeBSD-based servers acting as VPN, mail, database, web, DNS, collaboration and proxy servers. It was also crucial to track mission-critical enterprise applications and their database performance. Among other essential tasks was network equipment state and performance monitoring, including traffic control and tracking the bandwidth usage threshold crossing. It was also important to see the network traffic structure, i.e. applications and services occupying most network resources.
For meeting the project requirements, Pony Express IT management selected AggreGate Network Manager which, unlike its competitors, possessed all necessary tools for the existing IT infrastructure monitoring out-of-the-box.
The Network Manager tracks key performance metrics of servers, as well as core switches and routers by Hewlett Packard, 3COM and Cisco Systems. Application monitoring is enabled for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. One of the project objectives was applying standard profiles to monitor more than 10 Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2008 databases, including databases in a failover cluster mode used by lots of enterprise applications. Network traffic structure is easily discovered by collecting NetFlow v9 data and visualized by Network Manager.
AggreGate Network Manager made it possible to monitor the whole IT infrastructure from a single point. It helped to discover inefficiently used resources and bottlenecks reacting to potentially dangerous incidents before they appear. This prevented service downtime and minimized ticket count from the company staff. Ultimately, a synergistic effect was achieved – staff idle hours decreased while labor efficiency increased and the overall benefit from IT infrastructure utilization went up. View Case Study