Ingenica’s ManageView Automates Server Monitoring

With a population of 16,000, and located less than 20 kilometres south of Calgary in the Sheep River Valley along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, Okotoks is one of Canada’s fastest growing communities, averaging over 6 percent growth per annum over the last decade. Faced with such rapid expansion Okotoks IT department was tasked with maintaining an increasingly-busy network, without the luxury of being able to hire additional IT staff.”There simply was not enough office space for more people, and as a result the three existing IT staff had to find a way to maintain the high performance expected of Okotoks’ network,” said Charlene Nagy, IT Team Leader, Okotoks. “Okotoks needed an automated monitoring system that would be able to check on the servers 24 hours a day and then inform the IT department if there was a potential problem.

“With a firm understanding of its requirements, Okotoks began researching available automated monitoring solutions. The selected monitoring solution would have to be easy to install and integrate with Okotoks existing system, easy to administer, and cost effective. Additionally, it had to act as a constant watch dog, providing Okotoks’ IT staff with an early warning of server problems to enable them to fix potential problems before they brought down the network.”The automated monitoring solution had to be able to deliver 24/7 network alerts to desktops, laptops, or handheld devices in order to enable administrators to fix servers remotely,” explained Nagy.After researching the available technologies, Okotoks selected Ingenica’s ManageView as the ideal solution to its network monitoring problems.

A subscription-based server monitoring tool priced at just $79US per server per month ManageView requires no additional hardware at the client location, and requires less than 3MB of disk space to install, and less than 8MB of memory to run. It takes only a matter of minutes to download and install the agent on each server to be monitored.Once installed, ManageView collects comprehensive server data such as server uptime, CPU memory, and hard disk usage over a secure internet connection, and graphically presents these key server performance indicators on the easy-to-read color-coded ManageView Dashboard – providing IT administrators with all the data required to maximize server performance. ManageView also delivers a comprehensive and easy-to-read monthly server performance report on Windows and Citrix servers to provide all the data necessary to maximize network performance by expediting application delivery while simultaneously decreasing server downtime and related IT administration and help-desk costs.Okotoks found the ManageView agent simple to install on its six most critical servers, and due to its seamless integration with the existing system, Okotoks had the automated monitoring solution fully operational within a couple of days.

Also, ManageView’s intuitive design meant that an administrator only required 15 minutes to familiarize themselves with the technology.”ManageView comes with set server thresholds, but it is simple to adjust this level to meet an organization’s system requirements,” explained Nagy. “The monitoring solution then alerts an administrator if server performance dips below this level.”With the threshold set, ManageView provides Okotoks’ IT staff with real-time critical alerts containing important information and diagnostics about the health of its network to make it simple to narrow down the source of any potential problems and prevent expensive loss of productivity by virtually eliminating server downtime.”ManageView’s 24-hour alerts can be sent to any device, and provide important diagnostic information to make it simple to pinpoint potential problems,” commented Nagy. “I cannot always be in the office, and the fact that I know alerts will be sent to my Blackberry certainly provides me with piece of mind,” Nagy continued.

“For example, if I receive an alert letting me know that the exchange server is approaching memory threshold, and also letting me know which message size is too big, I can contact staff in the office to rectify the problem, or access the system from my laptop and correct the issue myself.”And in the event that work on the server is required, ManageView provides a simple graphic user interface that cleverly ignores any potential alarms that may be caused during maintenance.”If I let the solution know that I will be working on the servers between two and four in the afternoon, ManageView will enable me to set up a maintenance window that will provide all information relevant to the project I am working on while ignoring the alarms I actually create during that time,” noted Nagy. “So, if disk space is running short, it is very simple to rectify the problem by cleaning up any backup files.”In fact, in the nine months since in was installed, ManageView has met all Okotoks’ monitoring goals.”ManageView has made it possible for Okotoks to continue its high network performance in the face of increased system traffic without having to hire additional staff,” concluded Nagy.

“The solution provides clear diagnostics in real time, making it simple for a small IT staff to address possible server issues before they cause network downtime,” Nagy continued. “By automating the monitoring process, ManageView enables IT staff to concentrate on other tasks, and as such, I would certainly recommend this solution to any small or medium-sized business anxious to maximize network performance and eliminate server downtime.”