COMPANY
Riedel Communications
INDUSTRY
IT & Telecommunication and Media & Entertainment
COMPANY SIZE
Midsized Company
COUNTRY
Germany
SCALE
Small IT team, complex temporary networks across multiple event sites
At the Red Bull Air Race, pilots fly at over 400 km/h. The IT infrastructure has to be just as precise. Riedel Communications provides all wired and wireless communication for the race: HD video from cockpit cameras, audio and intercom systems, live timing, and television transmission.
At those speeds, flight maneuvers and altitude changes cause interference in wireless connections. A dropped signal doesn’t just affect the broadcast. It affects the race. The team needed to monitor everything in real time across a self-sustaining temporary network.
Riedel evaluated several tools before choosing PRTG. None met the combination of real-time alerting, usability, and deployment flexibility the team needed.
PRTG monitors the entire network at each race: switches, packet loss, transfer rates, and availability. At the Eurospeedway in Lausitz, 680 SNMP and Ping sensors covered two 300 MB full-duplex radio systems and the full network. Real-time analyses kept the team updated.
Named device and port configuration in PRTG eliminated manual labels, installation plans, and device lists. During patching, technicians know immediately which port to use and how.
Each team gets its own PRTG account: audio, wireless video, intercom, radio, and IT. Via the PRTG iOS app over VPN, team members can monitor and respond from anywhere on site.
Alerts are fully customizable. If a server goes down, only the server triggers an alert, not every application running on it. PRTG comes preconfigured on Riedel’s systems, ready at every race location.
At the end of the day, we went with PRTG. The software is extremely easy to use, and comes with the full range of network monitoring functions (WMI, SNMP, ICMP, etc.), regardless of the number of sensors included in your license. Compared to other commercial monitoring tools, PRTG performed the best in our tests.
