At Davidoff, monitoring with Paessler PRTG is a task for the entire team

About Davidoff

A symbol of excellence, Davidoff has been making luxurious cigars, smoking accessories, and spirits for more than 100 years. To keep a global brand like Davidoff competitive in today’s market, a smoothly functioning IT environment is a must. As the systems engineer at Oettinger Davidoff AG, Simon Wasmer is responsible for the operation and monitoring of Davidoff’s systems all over the globe.

In the past, he used Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) for this purpose. But due to its complexity, Wasmer was the only member of the IT team who could integrate new devices and systems into the tool. According to Wasmer, SCOM was also relatively expensive and proved somewhat vulnerable when monitoring the company’s network and cloud services.

Furthermore, the team was less than thrilled with how monitoring results were displayed by the solution. Despite these many drawbacks, the team was hesitant to switch to a new monitoring system; the effort seemed too great, and there simply wasn’t enough time given their daily workload.

It wasn’t until management was affected that Wasmer realized something had to change: critical emails kept arriving up to 12 hours late, without the monitoring solution notifying the IT team of the delay. The culprit? Issues with Windows 365 and Microsoft Azure – one of SCOM’s weak points, according to Wasmer.

“PRTG comes with countless default functions and is so easy and intuitive to use that my coworkers can relieve me of many of my monitoring duties. This helps reduce my workload considerably. Many other tasks can be automated by way of custom scripts, which also saves me a great deal of time. Although the switch from MS SCOM to PRTG is not entirely complete, PRTG already makes our day-to-day work a whole lot easier.”

Simon Wasmer, responsible for system monitoring at Oettinger Davidoff AG

Researching other monitoring tools than SCOM

Once it was clear that a change was inevitable, Davidoff began evaluating new tools. Systems such as Splunk and Dynatrace were quickly ruled out due to their complexity, while Nagios also proved to be too difficult to configure and operate. Azure Monitor was ideal for the cloud environment, but would have required the company to use a second solution for its on-premises systems. Since the goal was to simplify the monitoring, this was out of the question.

Eventually, Davidoff narrowed the field down to two tools: OpManager from ManageEngine and PRTG Network Monitor from Paessler. The company finally opted for PRTG, primarily due to the software’s intuitive operation, push notifications, and mobile apps for Android and iOS.

Monitoring globally distributed sites and cloud services

Today, Simon Wasmer and the IT team monitor their network and infrastructure in the Azure Cloud as well as at all the company’s locations (Switzerland, Florida, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic).

PRTG remote probes have proven an efficient and cost-effective solution for monitoring the company’s distributed networks: at no additional cost, Davidoff can deploy any number of these probes, which are Windows services installed on-site to monitor the local network and infrastructure and send encrypted (SSL/TSL) monitoring data back to the main PRTG server in Basel, Switzerland.

Worldwide, Davidoff now monitors more than 250 servers on-site and in the cloud, as well as 200+ network devices such as firewalls, access points, and switches. Its monitoring also covers various Azure and Microsoft 365 services:

“With PRTG, we can comprehensively monitor our email services in the cloud, and ensure that – as the team in charge – we are immediately informed in the event of a malfunction and can quickly take actions to fix it. It wasn’t until we started using PRTG that we realized how error-ridden our Microsoft cloud service can be. We’ve also benefited greatly from the software’s Azure and Microsoft 365 subscription cost sensors,” explains Simon Wasmer.

In addition to monitoring the infrastructure, network, and cloud with preconfigured PRTG sensors, Simon Wasmer has also created several custom sensors based on PowerShell scripts which he uses (for example) to monitor automation processes implemented with SS&C Blue Prism. During run cycles, these sensors store timestamps and other runtime information in text files.

The preconfigured or custom sensors monitor the text files and trigger alerts if certain critical content (defined in advance) is detected. Other custom scripts/sensors created by Wasmer scan all the servers within the Davidoff Active Directory for Windows services that are currently in use. A general list and a server-specific list exclude those services that are not to be considered.

As a result, the Davidoff IT team is always informed whether all the Windows services that should be running are actually running.

No bottleneck - workload distributed on many shoulders

Wasmer continues, “PRTG comes with countless default functions and is so easy and intuitive to use that my coworkers can relieve me of many of my monitoring duties. This helps reduce my workload considerably. Many other tasks can be automated by way of custom scripts, which also saves me a great deal of time. Although the switch from MS SCOM to PRTG is not entirely complete, PRTG already makes our day-to-day work a whole lot easier.”

In the future, Wasmer plans to not only integrate more systems into the monitoring, but also create more maps. PRTG maps are dashboards that are manually created via drag & drop and published as HTML pages. Oettinger Davidoff has branches around the world, some with multiple floors. Each of these locations has a centrally managed LAN/WLAN.

Wasmer plans to create a map that displays all the access points and switches at all the locations, including all the floors. This custom map will help the team to immediately identify anomalies and improve their understanding of correlations, and thereby prevent disruptions before failures occur.

Conclusion

Simon Wasmer sums up the benefits of the switch to PRTG: “We can now monitor all our relevant devices and systems with a single solution, whether they be in the cloud, at one of our branches, or in our main data center. PRTG from Paessler provides us with clear-cut, reliable information and immediately alerts us via push notification in the event of an emergency. Thanks to its ease of use and customizable scripts and sensors, PRTG has enabled us to automate many tasks or distribute them among the team. This reduces my workload and makes everyone on the team responsible for our systems, which ultimately results in less stress and more reliable systems.”

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