Private college in New York
Private college in New York
“After some time using another product we decided to opt for Pandora FMS, a monitoring software we can really trust.“
Rob Fredette, Senior Enterprise & Network Solutions Engineer in IT Services
THE ORGANIZATION
Nazareth College is a private college in Rochester, New York. Founded in 1924, its academic strengths cross an unusually broad spectrum of 60 majors, including education, health and human services, management, the fine arts, music, theater, math and science, foreign languages, and the liberal arts.
The coeducational, religiously independent, classic campus in a charming suburb of Rochester, N.Y., challenges and supports 2,300 undergrads and 700 graduate students. Nazareth is recognized nationally for its Fulbright global student scholars and commitment to civic engagement
THE CHALLENGE: GETTING ALL OF OUR NEEDS COVERED
Our main challenge was the lack of resources. On the one hand, we only had two full-time people supervising more than 600 network nodes, and on the other hand, we were using an obsolete monitoring system that gave many false positives of non-critical alerts
“Our main need was to have a tool that could specify the monitoring and alarm elements, instead of automatically generating the alerts. With Pandora FMS it was actually possible.”
Initially we were using another popular product, however it had quite a few drawbacks: a high cost in technical support renewals, great difficulty in the configuration of new devices, and an over-abundance of information in most cases. It often gave us alerts without the relevant information that is most vital for our needs.
After evaluating several products, we decided to deploy Pandora FMS, a platform that in the long run surpassed our expectations.
HOW WAS THE PROCESS?
One of the main challenges we found in the implementation of the project was that our WMI monitors did not work at the beginning. We tried to resolve the issue through online research and in various forums, but we were unable to find the solution. With this situation we decided to contact Pandora FMS technical support service and in a few hours they found the root cause.
Ultimately, what we needed to do was update the servers from the command line instead of using the web interface.
“When our WMI monitors didn’t work, we
contacted the Pandora FMS support team and received a solution in just a few hours”
TANGIBLE RESULTS OF THE MONITORING
With Pandora FMS we have also achieved a higher level of performance, since the loading times have been reduced to a great extent. Currently the time to get to the web interface of the monitors screen is a fraction of the loading time that we experienced with our previous supplier. In addition, we have the ability to configure alarms in specific monitored elements, which results in a reduction of false positive alarms, improving our confidence in the alert system.
“Ease of use is one of the key reasons we decided to go with Pandora FMS as our choice of monitoring platform. Our previous solution required navigating a multitude of screens to see the relevant alarms and the state of our
environment. With Pandora FMS it is much easier to see the state and which elements need attention.”
Vince Anderson, Director,
Enterprise & Network Solutions
INDIVIDUAL MONITORING DEVICES
SERVERS
NETWORK COMPUTERS
What we appreciate the most is the granularity of both the Module and Alarm configurations. Our last vendor was based on “Alarm for everything, add exceptions”. That design generated false positives that eroded our confidence in the alerts we were receiving. With Pandora FMS we have managed to recover that confidence and customize the alarms with what we really need.
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