Electronic Theatre Controls Inc. Substitutes MRTG With PRTG

Company Profile

Since its founding by Fred Foster in 1975, ETC (Electronic Theatre Controls, Inc.) has become a global leader in award-winning entertainment and architectural lighting equipment. ETC's fixtures, lighting control consoles, dimmers and distribution products are the backbone of lighting systems in venues worldwide -- from schools and churches, to community theaters and TV studios, to opera houses and theme parks.

Challenge

Dan Reain, the network administrator for Electronic Theatre Controls, wanted to replace his existing MRTG network-monitoring software.

Reain's old hybrid MRTG-Ethereal monitoring solution took many times longer to retrieve a list of top talkers and required significant manual intervention.

Reain and his team operate a VPN-connected environment that consists of 10 sites throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. ETC monitors the VPN links, as well as internal elements such as uplinks between switches, main servers, and remote-access devices.

In using MRTG, the ETC team had trouble investigating basic bandwidth spikes they saw on their Internet connection.

Reain and his colleagues, for instance, ran Perl and a third-party utility called MRTG. Configuration additions and changes took a long time to perform and the process to include the graph information in reports was manual.

Reain added that his old process to access top talkers was multi-layered and much more time consuming. The process included running Ethereal on an “older laptop”and then moving the file to a “faster machine” for processing. Reain then let Ethereal analyze the file -- sometimes for hours -- to compile a list of top conversations.

Solution

Reain replaced his MRTG software with Paessler's PRTG Traffic Grapher.

Reain knew that Paessler was coming out with a new version of PRTG that had top talker functionality, which was just what he and his team needed to effectively identify the source of their bandwidth spikes.

Today -- with PRTG -- ETC's network team efficiently identifies and analyzes data on its top talkers and enjoys what Reain calls “easy configuration.” They now have a true bandwidth-monitoring solution that runs as a service, includes a Web server, and can quickly customize and present data.

Moving forward, Reain and his team plan to “take advantage” of PRTG's various alerts and spike filters.

Customer Benefits

With Paessler's PRTG, the ETC network team spends less time on bandwidth monitoring and reporting and more time analyzing and improving their network.

The Windows-based PRTG has made configuring sensors “very fast and painless.” Reain, now spends a few minutes each morning looking over the previous day's reports – whereas with MRTG it took much longer to navigate through all the various links to view the same information.

Reain's network analysis is no longer cursory, but, rather, comprehensive and includes various graphs of one set of data, depending on the intended audience. The ETC team, for example, now has a clear and constant view of their Internet router bandwidth usage and displays the data on a big screen at their help desk. Reain has also created a graph that gives his team critical data on each of their firewalls – all on one page.

Reain added that he now automatically generates network reports that he includes in his monthly briefs to management. The PRTG reports reveal trends and “justify” the purchase of “network enhancements.”

After using PRTG, Reain noted that he would, indeed, recommend Traffic Grapher as a network-monitoring solution to both his colleagues and friends.

“PRTG allows me to do things I couldn't do with MRTG,” Reain said. “I'm finding that the more I work with PRTG, the more useful I can make it."