Paessler PRTG cares for each IT element vital for the nursing staff at LNA Santé

LNA Santé's needs

LNA Santé has a centralized and shared IT infrastructure, with a data center at the headquarters that hosts data and applications. These are distributed via Citrix software to all its facilities. The most sensitive data is stored at an approved health data host, as required by French law.

Eric Laurent, Head of Information Systems at LNA Santé, says: "Given that not all of the locations have IT personnel onsite, the entire IT management takes place remotely. This requires total control over applications and data passing through the network, which are crucial for the nursing staff. Availability is an essential issue that has quickly required the deployment of a monitoring solution".

LNA Santé needs complete visibility on the availability and proper functioning of each and every IT element at all of its sites: infrastructure, networks, telephony, applications, etc. This means they needed a reliable monitoring solution that could help them diagnose incidents quickly wherever they may be, and that was also easy to use on a daily basis.

To carry out this project, Eric Laurent decided in 2017 to call upon Sensor Factory, a monitoring specialist and IT service provider also based in Nantes. Eric Laurent says: "Beyond the simple integration of monitoring, we really needed to be accompanied by a knowledgeable partner, capable of helping our teams to optimize the solution and to implement operational processes. Sensor Factory convinced us with its reliability and expertise, and then advised us to deploy the monitoring solution they felt was most suited to our needs: PRTG by Paessler. “

Using PRTG dashboards for total visibility

Before discovering PRTG, LNA Santé was using a free and open source solution that could no longer be adequately maintained with limited internal resources, given the size of the infrastructure to be monitored. LNA Santé needed to rely on a solid solution.

Using PRTG, they deployed more than 13,500 sensors across the entire IT infrastructure. "The initial deployment phase covered 80% of our needs in detailed monitoring. For the remaining 20%, Sensor Factory helped us to develop customized sensors for our specific applications and components not natively covered by PRTG" comments Eric Laurent.

PRTG operates at two levels within the IT department: on the one hand, technicians receive configurable alerts in case of system malfunctions and they have access to all supervisory dashboards. On the other hand, management can easily monitor the health status of the IS at the headquarters and in the 72 facilities, using two dashboards that display on large screens a synthesis of the indicators in real time, colored green or red according to their availability status.

This optimal visibility allows the ISD to be aware of a problem and often to solve it before users even notice it.

Eric Laurent confirms: "One of PRTG's greatest strengths is certainly its very good user-friendliness, which makes it easy to visualize at all times. Beyond that, the ability of the software to group all sources of information in a single point and thus a single view on our large screens is useful. This is how we connect physical equipment, applications or our VMware Cloud Director consoles to PRTG, for example. It also gives us a better understanding of the components of our information system. The ease of use is incomparable compared to the free solution that we previously used."

The benefits obtained with PRTG

The ability to intervene proactively in problem prevention is a key factor that gives full satisfaction to Eric Laurent and his team at the ISD in their use of PRTG.

Thanks to faster problem resolution, the team has become more efficient, freeing up time for other projects. Downtime of services and applications has been significantly reduced, naturally improving the satisfaction rate of professionals within LNA Santé's institutions.

"The great added value of our monitoring is that we have a permanent knowledge of our IT situation, thanks to the maps on our screens, allowing us to communicate quickly with the users who encounter problems. In the health sector where everything is digitized, the availability of IT tools is essential for dealing with sometimes critical situations. That is why we survey our staff about the quality of our information system on a monthly basis. The recent gradual increase of our perceived performance indicators is related to improvements in our IS, and the monitoring of PRTG is undoubtedly one of the most important", says Eric Laurent.