When infrastructure monitoring
ensures education
Schools, technical colleges, universities, and other educational institutions
highly rely on a functioning and high-performance IT infrastructure. With PRTG, you have a
comprehensive overview of the performance and availability of the IT infrastructure.
Educational content is increasingly offered via the internet
Besides the already classic use of IT in administration or email communication, other areas are gaining in importance at a rapid pace. For example, educational content is increasingly being offered via the internet.
Videos in particular in which teachers, lecturers, and professors transmit learning content and tasks to pupils and students have become a part of everyday life. Furthermore, the organization of studies is done via web portals and non-IT systems from building services engineering to laboratory technology are integrated into the central IT.
The three main challenges in the education sector
Let’s look at some typical use cases:
Different monitoring
solutions are in use
Many educational institutions already use different monitoring systems from individual manufacturers in order to maintain an overview of the existing systems. For cost reasons, in-house solutions that were developed by student assistants and that are based on open-source projects are often used. If these students leave the institution, however, the knowledge is lost, and the solutions become unmanageable. In addition, a large number of systems that were set up by different departments and for different areas of application are often used. Keeping an overview typically ranges from difficult to impossible.
Monitoring of heterogeneous IT environments
Many different IT solutions are used in the education sector, and most of them are historical. It is rarely possible to reconcile these solutions in a simple way and to create a central overview. Therefore, it is important that besides the support of the common standards like SNMP, WMI, Flow, and packet sniffing, mechanisms are available that allow the fast and easy integration of "unknown" systems.
Monitoring of distributed locations
There are different approaches to monitoring distributed locations. In most cases, a full installation of the software is required at each location, which is a costly and time-consuming method. All instances must be paid for, individually set up, and maintained. All installations are then combined into one system to get a complete overview of all installations. This is both time-consuming and inconvenient for system administrators and is no longer appropriate for a monitoring system.
In addition to all the challenges listed here, which are typical for the education sector, all generally applicable requirements for a monitoring solution must also be met, of course. These range from simple operability to a reasonable price-performance ratio to comprehensive mechanisms for evaluating the monitoring data.
Reliable alerting in case of malfunctions or failures by a central unit is also an essential component that must not be missing.
The answer: unified monitoring with PRTG Network Monitor
A monitoring solution for educational institutions must meet standard requirements such as
feature set, usability, price performance ratio, licensing, implementation efforts, and technical support.
In this case, you should also turn your attention to the following aspects:
Consolidation
Consolidate all existing, individual monitoring solutions into one product - PRTG Network Monitor. The central solution that lets you keep track and alerts you in case of problems across multiple channels.
Versatility
With a variety of predefined sensors for both hardware and software integrated into PRTG and the use of common protocols, monitoring heterogeneous environments is no longer a challenge.
Adaptability
Our so-called remote probes collect monitoring data from distributed locations and efficiently transmit it to the central server using SSL encryption. Regardless of the license, an unlimited number of these remote probes can be used.
Future-proof through standards
and continuous improvement
Particularly in the education sector, there are usually numerous individual solutions developed at great expense. These are justified as they monitor self-developed applications or hardware for which no standard solution is available. In order to achieve a significant improvement here, a unified monitoring solution that requires little effort in implementation should be considered. Due to the continuous development and use of common protocols as well as the use of custom sensors, PRTG Network Monitor is a monitoring solution you can rely on in the future.
Paessler named Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice in the category IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools.
“Excellent tool for detailed monitoring. Alarms and notifications work greatly. Equipment addition is straight forward and server initial setup is very easy. ...feel safe to purchase it if you intend to monitor a large networking landscape.”
Infrastructure and Operations Engineer in the Communications Industry, firm size 10B - 30B USD
PRTG: perfect for monitoring IT environments in educational sectors
With PRTG, Paessler offers a comprehensive monitoring solution including all features
required for monitoring IT environments in educational sectors.
Alerting system
The setup and functionality of data transmission, storage, analysis, and publishing in educational technology is the same as in the classic IT network. PRTG users can define thresholds to be alerted before an outage occurs. They decide how to receive such notifications: via email, SMS, or push notification, for example. The notification feature is of great value to the people on call – they will immediately see where the issue lies and if the issue has been acknowledged by the responsible party.
Customized dashboards
With PRTG, you can create maps in HTML format within minutes. PRTG brings two worlds together in one view: classic IT and educational IT. Users can create customized dashboards via drag-and-drop to visualize all technology components in the educational institution. The dashboard can be built to display malfunctions, interferences, or outages as soon as they occur and it can also be configured to inform or alert the responsible parties.
Clear licensing, fair pricing
Every license of PRTG includes the entire functionality without add-ons or modules. This makes licensing clear and helps to calculate your ROI. PRTG comes in two different licensing models: CAPEX-based as a perpetual license or OPEX-based as a subscription model, both with the option to easily scale your monitoring with growing demands.
Summary
The right monitoring solution provides IT teams of educational institutions with a central overview
of the entire infrastructure. In addition, it has to have three essential characteristics:
Alerting in the event of
specific errors or failures
Notification about
unusual occurrences
Data basis for medium-term
and long-term IT optimization
PRTG Network Monitor comes with all of these and many more features and thus relieves the burden on IT teams in the education sector. The software combines efficient and uncomplicated monitoring of distributed locations and vendor-independent monitoring out of the box. Monitoring a wide variety of devices and applications with maximum usability and a fair pricing model are an issue, of course.
Manuals, video tutorials, and a comprehensive Knowledge Base are available for free on the Paessler website. For more detailed questions, an efficient email support promptly provides qualified answers. In addition, a dense network of competent service providers is available to provide help and advice when needed.
Success stories from our customers
Companies around the world trust PRTG Network Monitor when it comes to ensuring that their IT systems run smoothly.
School District of Pickens County uses Paessler PRTG to keep students & teachers productive
The School District of Pickens County (SDPC) is located in the northwestern region of South Carolina. SDPC includes 14 elementary schools, five middle schools, four high schools, and a state-of-the-art career and technology center. The district uses Paessler PRTG to monitor the network infrastructure for any anomalies that could come up to make sure instruction can continue without any hiccups.
Seattle Pacific University keeps students and faculty running with Paessler PRTG
Founded in 1891, Seattle Pacific University (SPU) is a Christian university based in Seattle, Washington. The school hosts 4,000 students and its IT department is responsible for providing a variety of services for both students & faculty. With Paessler PRTG, the IT team is notified of problems before they bubble up to the user level so that they can see a decrease in the number of complaints sent to the help desk.
Paessler PRTG helps thousands of US online high school students
Originally designed to help reluctant learners gain access to the kind of alternative education they need for credit recovery or supplemental assistance, class.com has become one of the country's most prominent providers of online curriculum for high schools. To keep its network running at optimum performance and thwart critical failures before they happen, class.com depends on Paessler PRTG.
“Easy to implement and configure with good technical support.”
R. v. S., ICT Manager at Heinen & Hopman Eng BV
Get more deep-dive information here!
Would you like to discover more about monitoring in the educational sector?
Then be sure to check out our inspirational blog posts and case studies.
