Parkstone Grammar School Introduced Network Monitoring

Challenge

Craig Judd has been the ITC Network Manager at the UK’s Parkstone Grammar School in Poole since 2001. His responsibilities include managing an extensive network of ten Servers, four networks, 1100 Users, 450 PC's, 40 Print Queues, 40 Network Printers, an Exchange Server, two Routers, two Proxies and more.

Like any school, users of the network expect their system to work, their files to be available and their connections to the web to be problem free. Accurate and efficient monitoring is therefore essential. Craig needs to know that problems may be developing before staff and students find that they can’t access their data and resources.

Solution

IPCheck Server Monitor has proved to be the ideal solution, and since March 2004, Craig has found the task considerably easier and more efficient.

When asked how he coped with the task before using IPCheck Server Monitor, Craig replies “We didn’t. Although we had looked at other products, I was excited about the web interface, and web server view offered by the software. Prior to this we had to wait for the phone to ring.”

With an experienced background, including working for Intel in Winnersh and being a Senior System Engineer at Computacenter, Craig knows what he is looking for in an effective solution. “I guess a product that does the job, quickly, simply and easily deserves appreciation”.

Craig also knows all too well how complicated some applications can be to setup, and found the easy installation and setup to be a significant benefit. “For an effective and simple solution to TCP/IP, SNMP, PING and custom monitoring, it has to be one of the easiest to implement. I had it up and running smoothly in less than an hour, and since then we have integrated our first set of 90 monitors.”

Yet one problem with an effective monitoring system is that people might become a little too reliant on it. So Craig recommends changing the standard alert sound to something more annoying!

“You can become very used to the noise, and like a phone ringing, you can eventually ignore it. I change it regularly so that my team wake up and look at the monitors when they are going off.

Also turning on the voice activated reader, to actually read the alert out, saves you from having to raise your eyes from what you are doing. It’s a nice tip, we use it all the time.

Well Done Paessler. It’s a great product.”