Schools, colleges and universities are highly dependent on a functional and performant IT infrastructure. In addition to the conventional uses of IT, other areas are quickly becoming increasingly important: Course materials and books are offered via the Internet, classes are organized through web portals and non-IT systems such as building controls or laboratory technologies are beginning to fall under IT’s control. But some classic IT challenges also have high significance, especially for the educational sector:
- IT environments at educational and research institutions often distributed across multiple locations
- Heterogeneous infrastructure caused by irregular growth
- Multiple, insufficient monitoring tools
Network monitoring is the solution to counter all these challenges and to keep track of IT. Besides the challenges listed above, which are typical for the education sector, all general requirements for a monitoring solution must also be met: from easy operation and a reasonable price-performance ratio to comprehensive mechanisms for analyzing and publishing monitoring data and alerting in case of faults and failures.
Paessler’s Unified Monitoring solution PRTG Network Monitor combines efficient and easy-to-use monitoring of distributed locations, vendor-neutral ‘Out of the Box’ monitoring of different devices and applications with maximum ease of use and a fair and transparent pricing model. Paessler offers a free 30-day trial of PRTG with full functionality: www.paessler.com/edu-tech. Manuals, video tutorials and an extensive knowledge base are available on the Paessler website for free.
‘My job at Westgate is definitely less stressful thanks to PRTG, but it has also made the user experience much better. If the mail server begins to fill up, PRTG will warn me and I can quickly expand it. I don’t need to rely on pupils or staff reporting problems – instead I can fix them before anyone is affected.’ Chris Green, IT manager of The Westgate School.
‘It is often the little things that make a lot of difference to how your network performs. We were impressed that there was no loss of granularity with PRTG, no matter how far you drilled down into the data, and we were able to start making helpful changes very quickly.’ James Preston, ICT Network Manager at Oxford Spires Academy.