Homedale, Idaho School District Assures IT-Services
IPCheck And PRTG Traffic Grapher at Homedale, Idaho School District
Company Profile
The Homedale, Idaho school district consists of three school; an elementary, middle and high school located in Owyhee County. With over 1200 students and a number of staff, the public school serves the needs of the county’s growing population.
Challenge
The districts three locations are several miles apart, connected with wireless Wide Area Network (WAN) links. Their servers run Web, e-mail, data, databases, file and print servers that are not all in one datacenter. With some servers running at remote sites and speed issues across the wireless links, they needed a way to monitor all of the services running at the remote locations as well as servers and routers and switches in the main server room.
Homedale’s IT staff first tried a freeware solution, but after spending considerable time trying to get it working, they realized it was costing too much in time, even if the solution was free. Other programs were too costly for the school district’s restrictive budget and freeware solutions fell short on features: they would only ping, and could not be considered reliable. To really find out if a service or server was down, the team would have to look at each individual server remotely and see if the service was up. This was not an option as it would mean reacting to complaints instead of being the first to know if there was an availability issue.
Solution
“My ISP recommended that I look at IPCheck and PRTG as that is what they used,” says Dave Holmes, technology coordinator at Homedale School District. “I wanted to not just monitor servers by pinging them, I wanted to monitor specific ports and services, such as mail, web etc. I also did not want to spend a lot of money. IPCheck and PRTG seemed just what I was looking for.”
Paessler IPCheck ensures us that some part of the network is not down and allows much more efficient monitoring of the network and services. The technology staff is now able to know almost instantly if something is down and can reset the service and have it up and running before anyone notices the interruption. IPCheck also provides the team with more time for other priorities, as they do not need to check and see if this device or that service is available.
“Paessler IP Check solution was a product that was affordable and reliable,” Holmes continues. “It runs perfectly. It is never down, no false positives, is very flexible and will monitor just about any port or service there is.”
IPCheck Server Monitor
IPCheck Server Monitor is a Windows-based software and multi platform ASP service. IPCheck makes it easy and affordable to detect network and website failures early, minimizing downtime and avoiding economic impact. Businesses increasingly rely on their networks to move data, provide communication, and enable basic operations. As networks and computer technology become more integrated with business, system outages can seriously impact the bottom line.
