Open Access

When applications running on a retailer’s master server go down, it can result in lost sales.

Before installing an innovative network monitoring program called PRTG, the only way Jason Lee, systems and security administrator for Garb-Ko, would know that a store was down was when an associate would call and say something like, “Hey, I can’t accept credit cards.”

Lee then had to determine the problem. “Was the IP down? Was the firewall down? …. A phone call would trigger six different options, and it would take from 15 minutes up to half a business day to troubleshoot and figure out the problem.”

PRTG provided Garb-Ko, a Saginaw, Mich.-based franchisor of 85 7-Eleven stores, instant visibility into its wide area network (WAN), and Lee estimates the company achieved ROI in about 30 days. “That is not counting the money we’ve saved by reducing lost sales, transportation and labor costs,” he adds. “If we could track that, the ROI would probably happen in a few days or less.”

An upgrading nightmare
When Lee joined Garb-Ko in late 2005, he walked into what he describes as “an IT person’s worst nightmare, converting pure analog stores to digital IP-based WAN. The system itself wasn’t the nightmare, it was the upgrade.”

The stores — 96 at the time — were spread through Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. ATMs, gas station controllers and POS “were all on dial-up with no access to fixing anything remotely,” he recalls. “Nothing was high-speed.

“There was a significant cost affixed to every problem we could not resolve by phone,” he says. “We often had to dispatch a technician 150 to 200 miles to fix those problems.”

The conversion process began in late 2007, with the rollout completed late last year. Lee realized, he says, that while the conversion was giving him a sophisticated network, he had no way of monitoring it or the systems and devices on it. On a local university’s student server, he saw a free version of PRTG. “I downloaded it and put it on a test server and it was phenomenal.

“It doesn’t just tell you if a device is alive, it will tell you things like whether the device being monitored is sending more or less traffic than normal,” he says. “That means I can determine in advance if a network card is going bad or if memory is possibly having an issue.”

Lee researched and tested several other vendors before choosing the PRTG Network Monitor developed by Nuremberg, Germany-based Paessler AG, whose North American headquarters are in Los Angeles.

PRTG’s software doesn’t directly give solutions to an IT manager, says Lee, “but it gives someone like me, with technical knowledge, the ability to get an overall picture of my network and to make logical business assumptions and decisions based on the data and supporting facts that PRTG delivers.”

Full scalability
PRTG is “easy to scale to a retailer’s particular needs,” says Ken Sanofsky, general manager for Paessler in North America. “It is simple to install and operate and also, as a point of difference, has its own built-in database, which means that users do not have to invest in any additional software such as a Microsoft SQL Sequel database to run on their servers.”

That was a feature that Lee found particularly appealing. “I can’t tell you what a pain it is to have a software package and then have to have a database on top of it,” he says. “Then you’ve increased your overhead.”

PRTG has more than 80 sensor types ranging from monitoring switches and routers to distributed monitoring over the full reach of the network. There is no additional licensing fee for any of these functionalities, Sanofsky says.

Using the latest version of iPRTG, an application for Apple mobile devices, IT administrators can log on to the PRTG network via their iPhone 4 or iPad. Lee, who uses the application on both his iPhone and iPad, keeps track of his network from wherever he happens to be. “Before,” he says, “they wouldn’t let me out of the building because if I was gone and something happened, they’d have to wait until I got back.

“Now, I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can access any network resource from the palm of my hand.”

Because PRTG allows Garb-Ko to monitor its network in intervals, bandwidth is never an issue. “Instead of communicating to every store at the same time,” says Lee, “PRTG lets me scan at 30-second intervals, 60-second intervals, five- or 10-minute intervals, etc. I have six devices at every store and I can scan some devices, like the store’s firewall, every 30 to 60 seconds for a quick ‘are you there ping’ and there are some devices like computers that I’ll scan every five minutes.”

Lee notes that if a retailer wants “full predictable metrics and the ability to pretty much see into the future with your network, PRTG provides it.

“If we lost PRTG on our network, I would feel like I was back in the cave man age,” he says. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”