COMPANY
Austrian Red Cross
INDUSTRY
Healthcare and IT & Telecommunication
COMPANY SIZE
Enterprise
COUNTRY
Austria
SCALE
Small to mid-sized IT team, one blood donation center plus regional Red Cross division
At a blood donation center, IT is part of the care chain. If the communication server goes down, delivery slips don't upload. If a database fails, blood products get stuck in processing. If a service silently stops writing to the database, nobody knows until something breaks downstream.
David Jungwirth, IT team member at the Austrian Red Cross in Upper Austria, needed full visibility across servers, databases, hardware, SSL certificates, and a healthcare communication platform built on HL7 standards. Standard tools weren't flexible enough. Custom-built solutions took too much time to maintain.
PRTG covered the basics out of the box: Ping sensors for availability, WMI sensors for storage, SNMP sensors for power supplies and fans, and SSL certificate monitoring.
The bigger win was flexibility. PRTG's preconfigured HL7 sensors monitor the soffico Orchestra communication server without touching patient data. If an interface goes down or a delivery slip upload fails, the team gets an alert immediately.
PRTG also monitors Oracle databases. Irregularities at the database level reveal process failures before they surface elsewhere.
Custom sensors took it further. When a service stopped writing to the database after a cluster node migration, Jungwirth configured PRTG to read event logs via WMI. If the service loses database access, PRTG detects it and triggers a restart script. No helpdesk ticket. The problem solves itself.
We rely on the comprehensive and reliable monitoring of devices and systems to ensure the proper functioning of our IT – and ultimately the processes and services of the center. PRTG is not only effective, but also helps us save resources.
