COMPANY
Virginia Tech CALS
INDUSTRY
Education
COMPANY SIZE
Enterprise
COUNTRY
United States
SCALE
1 network engineer, 123 distributed facilities, ~ 500 devices, 180 access
points
Mark Crawford is the network engineer for the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). He is responsible for 123 facilities spread across Virginia, from small 3-person offices to large agricultural research centers, many in rural areas with limited local IT support.
He configures the equipment, monitors it, and handles planning and implementation for every site. Alone.
His previous tool, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, wasn’t cutting it. The interface was disorganized and getting a clear picture of 500 devices across 123 locations was harder than it needed to be.
Crawford switched to PRTG for clarity. The interface was logical, the dashboard loaded from a browser, and the device tree made sense.
He overlaid each distributed office onto a map of Virginia, giving him a literal geographic view of his entire network. When something goes wrong, he can see exactly where.
PRTG monitors servers hosting Active Directory, a local backup solution, and four SAN units, including devices not on the public network. PRTG connects to both private and public networks and sends alerts on everything regardless of access restrictions.
PRTG automatically routes alerts to the right person based on which part of the device tree is affected. Each of Crawford’s six area IT staff and the central help desk gets only the alerts relevant to their area.
When a location reports their internet is down, Crawford checks PRTG and finds the real cause immediately.
What’s interesting to me is when the sensors show unusual traffic, a lot of times you can tell. The call we’ll have to the help desk is “our internet’s down” – well, in fact, no, your internet is not down, someone is hogging all your bandwidth. And that’s very easy to spot.
