With Paessler PRTG, Oettinger Davidoff turns monitoring into teamwork

In the past, Oettinger Davidoff used Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) for this purpose. Due to the complexity of the product, only a specialist in the Oettinger Davidoff IT team was able to integrate new devices and systems into SCOM. According to Oettinger Davidoff, 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.

However, when time-critical emails arrived up to 12 hours late over a period of several days without the IT team having been informed by the monitoring solution, the team had to take action. The cause was issues with MS Office 365 – one of SCOM's weak points, according to the SCOM specialist.

Researching other monitoring tools than SCOM

Once it was clear that a change was inevitable, Oettinger Davidoff began evaluating new tools. Various systems were very quickly ruled out due to their complexity. 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.

The company finally opted for Paessler 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, the Oettinger Davidoff IT team monitors its 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, Oettinger Davidoff can deploy any number of these probes, which are Windows services installed on-site to monitor the local network and infrastructure and send TSL-encrypted monitoring data back to the main PRTG server in Basel, Switzerland.

Worldwide, Oettinger 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 the monitoring expert at Oettinger Davidoff.

In addition to monitoring the infrastructure, network, and cloud with preconfigured PRTG sensors, the monitoring expert of the Oettinger Davidoff IT team 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 Oettinger Davidoff scan all the servers within the 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 Oettinger Davidoff IT team is always informed whether all the Windows services that should be running are actually running.

PRTG provides a hierarchical overview of Oettinger Davidoff's IT

No bottleneck – workload distributed on many shoulders

The responsible IT engineer 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, Oettinger Davidoff 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.

Oettinger Davidoff 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.

A detailed map in PRTG provides an overview of the performance and availability of the Oettinger Davidoff network.