COMPANY
Dayton Children’s Hospital
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
COMPANY SIZE
Enterprise
COUNTRY
United States
SCALE
20 locations, 4,000+ staff, 22,000 IoT devices, 400+ applications
At a children’s hospital, IT downtime is not an inconvenience. It is a patient care issue. When clinicians can’t access imaging systems, EHR records, or telemetry data, care slows down.
When Colin Metzler joined the Network Admin Team at Dayton Children’s Hospital, after-hours calls from clinicians reporting technical issues were a constant drain. The existing monitoring tool made it hard to pinpoint the source of a problem. With 4,000 staff across 20 locations using more than 22,000 IoT devices and 400 applications, the team was always reacting instead of preventing.
Healthcare IT is uniquely complex. Structured tiers of systems, strict uptime SLAs, and the direct link between technology performance and patient outcomes leave no room for guesswork.
Metzler had used PRTG previously at a defense contractor and knew it could handle the scale. The team deployed PRTG Enterprise Monitor with ITOps Board, using 21,000 sensors and eight remote probes across all locations.
PRTG now monitors top-tier patient-impacting applications first: EHR systems, PACS imaging, clinical communication platforms, and telemetry. If a service degrades, the team knows before clinicians notice.
Every morning, the technology team reviews PRTG reporting together. Percolating issues get flagged early. Cross-team accountability improves. Metzler also built a custom sensor that monitors software release notes pages, triggering immediate patch updates to reduce vulnerability windows and cut cyberattack risk.
Data center temperature, mean time between failures, and SLA compliance are all tracked in one place. Subnetwork scans flag unauthorized devices for security and capacity planning.
PRTG gives a birds-eye view of your network to troubleshoot problems or look at systems in their entirety that other solutions cannot – and I have looked at all of them.
