UK Law Firm Monitors it's Infrastructure Using IPCheck

Company Profile

Taylor Wessing offers its clients a full range of law services in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and China. Its experience lies mainly in serving industries that are strong in intellectual property and technology. Neil Law is the infrastructure manager in the company's London office and heads a team of five.

Challenge

For some time Neil's team had been using Microsoft's Operations Manager, which they found to be good when the problem had been identified, but not if the problem was unknown. The product was not precise enough in its reporting so this led to a search for a more detailed solution. Neil looked at monitoring companies that charged anything from £12,000 a year just to monitor email up to £120,000 for across the board monitoring. Neither were options. He also considered HP Open View but, due to the length of time required to train personnel on the product and, thereafter, the potential high staff turnover Neil dismissed it.

Instead he looked for a product that was "simple but very powerful". He went on to say that the number one criteria for Taylor Wessing was that email should not be interrupted, the product chosen would have to monitor night and day.

Solution

The solution was found in Paessler's IPCheck Server Monitor. Rather than have personnel staff the office 24 hours a day in case of a breakdown Neil simply instructs the Paessler product to send an SMS alert to a landline, which in turn would ring by the on-duty team member's bedside, and advise that things had gone "horribly wrong".

Moreover Neil weighted IPCheck Server Monitor's sensors so that it could determine whether or not something was worth while calling people back to the office in the middle of the night or not. "We've built up a relationship so that we know how serious the problem is - and it might heal itself," he said.

"We've found that the possibilities are fairly limitless and to perform this initial critical task was very easy to set up - and very cheap too, about £100. I'm fairly sure that other, more expensive products, don't have the ability to do this." said Neil.

While Taylor Wessing bought the IPCheck Server Monitor product for one purpose initial purpose - email flow - and they are now finding it has additional, useful, functionality. He puts this down to the time taken to learn and understand the product. Benefits mean that no-one has to trawl through the management software for all of the servers - Dell, HP, IBM - as all report into the one Paessler tool that watches them for the team. So far they haven't found anything that it can not monitor or cope with.

"So now if the hard disk is going to fail in the next week or so we get an email as soon as the machine knows this is going to happen."explained Neil.

IPCheck Server Monitor has been in use at Taylor Wessing for about a year and the team has started to lift it out of its monitoring-only role. They now run a Windows Management Interface (WMI) script that tells them what software is installed. They then run a sensor on this baseline and monitor every machine in the company with IPCheck Server Monitor. If the system changes or there's suddenly extra software on the system Neil knows that there's a good chance of them having a virus or worm or something that's installing software. "So it's also given us a rudimentary intrusion detection system too."

IPCheck Server Monitor will tell the infrastructure team if the status on individual PCs changes. It will monitor all log-ons and log-offs and report on the situation - for example a failed log-on on the third floor. "It is very impressive." Neil commented. "There are a lot of monitoring tools out there that will tell you what the hardware is doing and others that say what the software is doing, but this is the only one that will do both in one tool."

Neil says that the Paessler product is a very powerful tool, and all you have to do is think what you want it to do - and it probably can. "There's nothing that we've come up with that it hasn't been able to cope with. But don't expect boxes to be there to be ticked - you have to take the time and trouble to get to know the product and then it will pay you back in spades." he said.

"With the uptime reports and the historical data for looking at trends we are able to make provision to avoid problems before they occur - it is allowing us to manage the technical side of the business more efficiently. Personally I think it is brilliant, I really do."

Neil stressed that to get the best out of the product you have to be prepared to get to know it and work round what might seem, at first, to be limitations. "Paessler has its own scripting engine, and it doesn't do a good enough job for us. A developer would have to learn its language, we need to be able to use Mircosoft language. It was frustrating to begin with when the product was saying that it wouldn't work. Once we worked out how to get round it - by taking our scripts and the exit codes that they produce, and using another script to bundle them into a exit code that IPCheck Server Monitor can understand - all the problems disappeared. Now we can wrap any script we like and send it on its way."

For Neil Law's team the Paessler product has made life both easier and more efficient - and they'd have no hesitation in recommending it to colleagues and peers.