COMPANY
Fulham FC
INDUSTRY
Media & Entertainment
COMPANY SIZE
Midsized Company
COUNTRY
United Kingdom
SCALE
Two data centers, 3 sites, 250+ employees, stadium IT
Fulham Football Club has been playing at Craven Cottage since 1896. Behind every home game stands an IT infrastructure spanning two data centers, three locations, and more than 250 employees. Fulham is a 365-day-a-year operation: players train, staff prepare for the next match, and the stadium hosts corporate events on non-match days.
The infrastructure includes VMware, EMC storage, Juniper switches, a VPLS network from Exponential-e, and a Veeam backup solution. If key systems fail, operations are severely disrupted. Match cancellations become a real risk.
The team needed monitoring that could give constant visibility across the entire estate and help them shift from reactive to proactive.
After evaluating OpManager, SolarWinds, and Nimsoft, the team chose PRTG for its strong price-to-performance ratio and ease of daily use.
sFlow sensors monitor bandwidth usage on match days, providing visibility into traffic patterns that can only be observed in real conditions. VMware sensors track the virtual environment. Stadium turnstiles are pinged continuously to verify they're operational before kick-off.
A large screen in the office displays the full network topology and status of all sensors, giving the team an at-a-glance view at all times. The PRTG iOS app extends that visibility on the road, enabling the Head of IT to detect and respond to alarms outside office hours.
Threshold-based alerts fire by email the moment a serious failure occurs, ensuring no issue goes unnoticed regardless of the hour.
Even if there isn't a game going on, the players are training, people here are gearing up for the next big match, and often our event spaces are being hired out for corporate functions. Being able to ensure that the IT network is able to support those activities is hugely important.
