Farmers Capital Bank Corp. Migrated from BigBrother

Management Summary

Farmers Capital Bank Corporation is a financial holding company located in Frankfort, Kentucky. The company operates 26 banking locations in 16 communities throughout Kentucky, as well as a leasing company, a data processing company, a mortgage company and an insurance company. Its stock is publicly traded on the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System (NASDAQ), SmallCap Market Tier, under the symbol FFKT.

The Challenge

Prior to implementing Paessler’s products, IPCheck Server Monitor and PRTG Traffic Grapher, FCB did not have a solution for monitoring bandwidth utilization in a near real-time scenario. The corporation had used BigBrother in the past to do ping tests on routers and servers. This was very basic and did not provide FCB with any solid data, so many things went unchecked.

After evaluating several Linux and Windows solutions, FCB determined that PRTG and IPCheck Server Monitor were the easiest and most comprehensive solution. The ability of both products to be customized with non-standard SNMP MIBs made it a breeze to add in router parameters that FCB wanted to graph and monitor.

The Solution

FCB implemented Paessler’s products, PRTG and IPCheck Server Monitor, on its corporate WAN. The company has a server located in its corporate data center that uses these two products to monitor bandwidth utilization, server services, hard disk utilization, CPU utilization and other vital statistics of key mission critical servers.

Customer Benefit

Paessler’s products have enabled FCB to produce charts and graphs that show an accurate history of bandwidth usage, server uptime and response time, hard disk usage, CPU usage and even file changes. According to Eric Elder, IT Manager for FCB, having this information on hand it makes it simple to justify to management the need for more hardware, faster connections, or the need to do things differently. “It only takes me a couple of clicks to bring up a custom report detailing time frames and data I wish to graph and display,” he said. “The built-in web server and web management has made it easy to share this data with upper management. Now they can look at the health of our network or servers any time they desire.”

It has also helped FCB add new services across its WAN. “Now we know how much headroom we have on our circuits and can better estimate the effects of additional traffic on our networks,” said Elder. “Simply put, Paessler has taken the guesswork out of everything.”

Elder was pleasantly surprised that setup on both products was very intuitive. He had each of the products installed, monitoring and graphing in about 15 minutes. “I think I have spent approximately two hours total setup time to monitor 70 servers and about 100 router interfaces,” he said. “Each item I wish to monitor takes about two minutes to add from start to finish.”

Elder said that after running the products for about a month, he has been able to save the company money by not increasing the bandwidth of five of the company’s sites that complained about slow response time. It turned out that the slow response time was due to other issues, not bandwidth availability.

He is also able to show that he has adequate headroom to add additional services such as VoIP and has upper management wanting to see ROI numbers on VoIP implementation. He estimates that VoIP will save the company about $2,000 or more per month in long-distance charges simply by connecting the company’s phone switches via VoIP while maintaining the same desk handsets, which will reduce employee learning curve.

“The notification features have been a great asset in response times to problems,” said Elder. “Everyone who needs to know of a problem is alerted via email sent to their cellular phones. The escalation features notify me if a problem has been going on for an extended amount of time. From a management perspective it allows me to hold accountable personnel that is responsible for correcting issues.”

Elder said he would recommend Paessler’s products to friends and colleagues. “It has been the easiest product to implement and provides us a wealth of information that would otherwise not be monitored,” he said. “The data we collect now enables us to trend things that we otherwise took for granted. We now have strong baselines and know what is truly ‘normal’ versus what simply seemed normal or out of spec.”

About Paessler IPCheck Server Monitor

IPCheck Server Monitor from Paessler is a Windows-based network uptime and downtime monitoring software. IPCheck Server Monitor makes it easy and affordable to detect network and Web site failures early, minimizing downtime and avoiding economic impact.

About Paessler PRTG Traffic Grapher

PRTG Traffic Grapher is an easy-to-use Windows software that monitors bandwidth usage and other network parameters via SNMP. PRTG allows you to quickly and easily set up and run a monitoring station for SNMP enabled networks.