Counter-Strike Website Performs With PRTG

Company Profile

GameData, Inc. operates various gaming-related Websites such as Counter-Strike.com, a player community site for Counter-Strike, the popular team-based Half-Life online action game series. The game website is an important source of information, downloads and player forums for the gaming community.

Counter-Strike is the most widely played online first-person shooter game in the world. In 2002 there were over 30,000 populated Counter-Strike servers on the Internet and in 2006, Valve's content-delivery platform, Steam regularly shows over 200,000 players simultaneously playing any of the three Counter-Strike games (Counter-Strike; Counter-Strike: Source; and Counter-Strike: Condition Zero) at any point in time. According to Steam, these players collectively contribute to over 6.177 billion minutes of playing time each month.

Ensuring the Counter-Strike.com community site and it’s enabling infrastructure are running at peak performance and are able to handle surges in traffic around new releases, updates and mods is critical.

Challenge

Mr. Pete Gilcrease, a vice-president at GameData, Inc., needed to find a comprehensive network-monitoring solution that he and his staff could install and work with in an efficient manner.

The GameData team had been using the free network monitoring program MRTG that was “complicated to install and manage,” Mr. Gilcrease said. The program’s involved set-up process prevented the team from adding servers and devices to their network on a regular basis.

Mr. Gilcrease and his team wanted their monitoring solution to include software that would notify them if one of their servers stopped responding or reached a critical CPU level. The team also needed the ability to view the overall health of their network online.

Solution

Mr. Gilcrease replaced his network team’s MRTG program with Paessler’s PRTG Traffic Grapher. The team uses PRTG Traffic Grapher to monitor CPU on all of their servers, bandwidth, RAM and available hard drive space.

PRTG Traffic Grapher is an easy to use Windows software for monitoring and classifying bandwidth usage. It provides system administrators with live readings and long-term usage trends for their network devices.

Additionally, the GameData network team uses Paessler’s IPCheck Server Monitor to keep a close watch on server up time and to alert staff members when servers stop responding. The Paessler solution also monitors FTP and Website up times for the team and notifies staff members of problems.

IPCheck Server Monitor helps organizations to monitor critical network resources, and to detect system failures or performance problems immediately, thus minimizing downtimes and their economic impact. Remote network monitoring and management is possible via web browsers, Pocket PCs or the Windows Client.

GameData uses IPCheck to monitor about 200 sensors and uses PRTG Traffic Grapher to monitor another 200 sensors.

The two network-monitoring solutions were easy for Mr. Gilcrease and his team to install. Further, adding new devices for monitoring were straightforward painless he said.

Together, the two network-monitoring solutions have been “extremely helpful to GameData’s network team,” Mr. Gilcrease said.

Benefits

Mr. Gilcrease and his team have used IPCheck and PRTG Traffic Grapher to reduce the time it takes them to add new devices for monitoring, as well as realize operational efficiencies that have “decreased costs for us.”

The two Paessler solutions have made it “easier” for the team to manage GameData’s entire network, including FTP servers, which -- for Mr. Gilcrease -- served as value-add functionality.

Mr. Gilcrease added the he would “definitely” recommend Paessler's network-monitoring solutions to his colleagues and peers.

“Their software products do everything they say they do and more,” he said. “We've been able to use the software for much more than we originally intended to use it for. I'm sure we will be purchasing further from Paessler in the future.”