US School District Uses PRTG at 9 Locations

Company Profile

The Oak Creek School District, located in southeastern Milwaukee County, borders Racine County on the south and Lake Michigan on the east. The district has five elementary schools with grades K-5, two middle schools, and one high school.

Challenge

The school district has over 1500 workstations distributed over nine locations, using six cable modems to access the internet in a concentrated period of time. Students and teachers use the Internet to perform research and tasks, often through bandwidth-intensive flash presentation, videos and sound clips. Without a network traffic monitor solution, it was difficult to track how much bandwidth was being used at which locations, or if there was enough access to meet the needs of their students and staff.

Solution

Oak Creek’s Network Manager, Chris Spadanuda, reviewed several solutions that seemed to fit their needs and budget. However, most of the solutions included features they did not need, were more complex than necessary and stretched their budget unnecessarily. Paessler’s Router Traffic Grapher (PRTG) provided an easy solution at an affordable price.

“We needed a simple tool that would provide the data we needed to make network access more efficient and help us plan for bandwidth usage,” said Spadanuda. “If additional bandwidth should be purchased, we need to be able to validate that with usage data.”

PRTG monitors the district’s Cisco routers and switches to produce reports that can be viewed either on site, or offsite from a Web browser, allowing Spadanuda and his team 24 X 7 access to ensure Oak Creek’s students and staff can complete their lessons.

Paessler Router Traffic Grapher

PRTG Traffic Grapher results may be viewed either via Windows interface or Web interface. Sample reports may be viewed at http://www.paessler.com/prtg. PRTG is available in both a Freeware edition and in Commercial editions that provide monitoring for several network devices and multiple ports simultaneously. PRTG works with most routers and firewalls, including systems from Cisco, Draytek, Bintec or LANCOM and Windows servers. PRTG also operates with most other SNMP enabled devices.