COMPANY
School District of Pickens County
INDUSTRY
Education
COMPANY SIZE
Enterprise
COUNTRY
United States
SCALE
32 sites, 16,000 students, 2,000 employees
The School District of Pickens County (SDPC) spans 32 sites across northwestern South Carolina: 14 elementary schools, five middle schools, four high schools, and a career and technology center. More than 16,000 students and 2,000 employees depend on the network every day.
John Anderson leads technology services with a staff of 18. The team owns the full IT stack across every site: switches, servers, UPS systems, bandwidth, email archiving, physical security, and hybrid cloud infrastructure. When something fails, the impact is immediate. The district's budget leaves no room for reactive firefighting.
SDPC runs Paessler PRTG on a single server at a nearby university data center, with one probe device covering 2,600 sensors across 32 separate network subnets.
PRTG monitors the full environment: switch uplink ports at each school, Windows servers for print management and life safety systems, UPS units, bandwidth, email archiving, and a Nutanix hybrid cloud cluster with threshold alerts on CPUs, memory, disk, and storage controllers.
When fiber failed at several schools, PRTG alerted the team before teachers noticed. When network segments began crashing, Anderson's team was already troubleshooting before it reached the front end. The alerts go out first.
With limited budget for additional hardware, PRTG's flexibility lets the team manage more with existing resources. Anderson is also exploring API integration to automate helpdesk ticket creation from sensor alerts, reducing response time without adding headcount.
It was hard being short-staffed during the pandemic. PRTG helped because no matter where we were, we knew where the problems were without waiting for the schools to call us, and our technical support were able to help.
