Pen manufacturer Prodir signs over Europe-wide IT monitoring to Paessler PRTG

About Prodir

Prodir is a Swiss manufacturer of stylish and personalized promotional pens. The company has around 250 employees, who not only work at Prodir’s production plant and headquarters in the Canton of Ticino in Switzerland, but also at seven sales offices across Europe.

The supplier maintains direct contact with these sales offices, which are located in Germany, Austria, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Great Britain. All offices (including the headquarters in Switzerland) share a virtualized IT infrastructure with a variety of devices and systems. In order to keep things running smoothly, Prodir’s IT Manager Cristian Santinon and the other two members of the IT team monitor the availability and performance of the entire infrastructure.

To help them with this task, the team relies on technical tools. Previously, they used monitoring software from SolarWinds. But as the company’s monitoring requirements grew, they encountered more and more problems with this solution. Santinon therefore began looking for a more efficient and user-friendly alternative to help out his team. A long-time system integrator at Prodir recommended PRTG Network Monitor software from the manufacturer Paessler as he had already had much success using the tool. For Prodir, PRTG Network Monitor proved to be the perfect fit. The company was thrilled with the software’s intuitive design, monitoring options, and comprehensive licenses, each of which included the entire range of monitoring features (e.g., VMware and NetFlow monitoring). The fact that PRTG also offered free apps for iOS and Android and the PRTG app for desktop (in addition to the web interface) was simply the icing on the cake.

“PRTG is the perfect fit for our infrastructure. It lets us monitor proactively and remotely, allowing us to shorten our response times to IT issues considerably. The software is set up in no time, and offers an outstanding cost-performance ratio. The decision to go with Paessler was easy,” explains Cristian Santinon, IT Manager at Prodir.

“We especially love the mobile app. It makes it super easy to manage pretty much our entire infrastructure, 24/7, regardless of our location. Thanks to the app, we’ve been able to reduce our response times to IT issues by around 20 percent. Similarly, we now spend a lot less time on the administrative aspects of monitoring. With PRTG, our small IT team of just three people can monitor the entire IT infrastructure both reliably and efficiently.”

Cristian Santinon, IT Manager at Prodir

Why PRTG is the right monitoring solution for the enterprise

Easy-to-read interface

In its data center, Prodir uses LANs and WANs in a virtual environment powered by VMware. PRTG monitors both the hardware layer and the VMware environment, as well as the applications running therein. The software then displays the monitoring results on an intuitive web interface: “Thanks to the wide range of features of PRTG, we can monitor our entire IT infrastructure with a single monitoring solution. A quick glance is all it takes to ensure everything is running smoothly,” affirms Cristian Santinon.

Open system

Thanks to preconfigured PRTG “sensors” (queries), the Prodir IT team was able to quickly implement the monitoring system. The PRTG Auto Discovery feature scanned the network and automatically created sensors for the detected devices. Prodir now uses PRTG to monitor all the important aspects of its IT infrastructure, including the memory of its VMware hosts, compliance with service level agreements (SLAs) on its homepage, and the performance of its Exchange and SharePoint servers. In addition to standard sensors, PRTG comes with a well-documented API and “custom sensors” for creating individual queries. Prodir was therefore able to use the HP LeftHand API to quickly integrate its HP storage system into the centralized monitoring environment.
The company can also set individual threshold values on the sensors for each of the components in its infrastructure. If one of these thresholds is exceeded, the tool immediately triggers an alarm. The alerts can be accessed on the PRTG web interface, the PRTG app for desktop, and the PRTG apps for iOS/Android, and are accompanied by live sensor status information.

Remote monitoring via app

This wide selection of interfaces provides Christian Santinon and his team with an extremely high level of transparency. The IT workers can keep a constant eye on the entire infrastructure, both at the office and while on the go. The team receives alerts from PRTG by email, SMS, or push notifications sent directly to their smartphones. Thanks to the PRTG apps for iOS/Android, they can access PRTG from anywhere, acknowledge alarms, determine causes and correlations, and if necessary, take the first steps towards remediation.

Conclusion

In the case of Prodir, PRTG proves that a complex IT infrastructure can be managed and monitored with very little manpower. PRTG was configured in such a way to display live monitoring data on several desktop interfaces. Using mobile apps, the IT team can access PRTG while on the go and immediately respond to emergencies. “The PRTG early warning system lets us fix most problems quickly, thereby preventing failures and downtime,” Santinon reports.

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