American City Business Journals Migrated from Cacti to PRTG

Company Profile

As one of the country’s largest publishers of metropolitan business newspapers, the American City Business Journal (ACBJ) covers national and local business news in more than 40 cities, serving more than 4 million readers. Its online unit, bizjournals.com, reaches web users with business news and services. ACBJ also owns Street & Smith’s Sports Group, which publishes several sports publications, including SportsBusiness Journal and Hemmings Motor News. The company is headquartered in Charlotte, NC, and manages 1,900 employees in 45 remote offices.

The Challenge

Bryan Hart, network administrator for ACBJ, said that after experiencing significant problems with Cacti, his company began using Paessler’s product, PRTG, to monitor its remote-market routers and core network equipment at corporate headquarters. According to Hart, Cacti worked fine for some things, but it would break when he would try to add a particular portion of the network. “Cacti was difficult to install,” he said. “We also had trouble adding our frame network. As soon as we added it, it would break Cacti in such a way that we could no longer add any devices.”

The Solution

“We needed a product that could provide current and past bandwidth utilization for our links to remote markets,” said Hart. “PRTG was recommended by most everywhere we looked.”

PRTG allows ACBJ to monitor all portions of its network in regard to bandwidth. PRTG also saves Hart’s team time because they no longer have to reinstall Cacti every month or research problems in bandwidth slowness or line errors. The team can now be more proactive than reactive.

“PRTG allows us to gather information that we didn’t have before,” said Hart asked for his customer benefit. “Without PRTG, we would have no history to help troubleshoot.”