Seattle Pacific University keeps students and faculty running with Paessler PRTG

University IT departments are charged with a lot of responsibility. They have to ensure a wide variety of services for faculty and students, they truly need to maintain 24/7 availability for critical services and they often play the role of a service provider as well. At Seattle Pacific University, Brendan McGree works as a system engineer responsible for monitoring servers, services and applications hosted both on campus and in the cloud.

McGree was tasked with managing the department's network monitoring software. His department had been using both Microsoft SCOM and PRTG Network Monitor, but when he took over, he realized changes needed to be made. SCOM had created a variety of problems and extra work, and the PRTG instance in use was a bit out of date. Ultimately, he decided to upgrade PRTG and became the in-house guru on how to use the software.

"One of the biggest things I liked about [PRTG] personally was that it doesn't have to have agents installed, whereas SCOM, especially if you're running anything not on Windows, you need an agent," McGree said. "PRTG didn't have that requirement on anything, which is awesome."

The university benefits most from PRTG in terms of notifications and understanding problems as they are occurring, before users feel them. McGree visited another university IT department to learn more about their Nimble implementation, and was surprised to find out they didn't use monitoring at all. "The big thing that stood out at least to me is that they don't use a monitoring service, they just wait until students or professors send in complaints to the help desk," he said.

With PRTG, McGree and his department are often notified of problems before the bubble up to the user level, and have seen a decrease in the number of complaints sent to the help desk. And, even if the team is not in the office, they track complaints through email notifications and the PRTG app for iOS.

Additionally, McGree said that the university rarely needs to use Paessler support, but has had nothing but good experiences with the team. In fact, he's become such an expert on PRTG that he serves as an internal support for the rest of his team. "If something goes wrong with PRTG they come and ask me, and it's great that nothing ever really does," he said.