Private college in New York
Nazareth College is a private college in Rochester, New York. Founded in 1924, its academic strengths span an unusually broad spectrum of 60 majors, including education, health and human services, administration, fine arts, music, theater, mathematics and science, foreign languages, and liberal arts. The co-educational, nondenominational, classical campus in a charming neighborhood of Rochester, New York, is challenging and supportive of 2,300 undergraduates and 700 graduate students.
STARTING POINT
Nazareth es reconocida a nivel nacional por sus acadĆ©micos del programa Fulbright y su compromiso con la participaciĆ³n cĆvica.
Our main problem was that we had limited resources. We had only two full-time staff to oversee more than 600 network nodes, and an outdated monitoring system that gave many false positives for non-critical alerts.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. Pandora FMS made that possible.”
Rob Fredette, senior enterprise and network solutions engineer for Nazareth College IT services
PROJECT’S CHALLENGE
Our previous monitoring product had quite a few drawbacks: a high cost for technical support renewals, great difficulty in configuring new devices, and an overabundance of information in most cases. Generally, it provided us with alerts without great specifications and most of them were not valid for our needs.
Also, with more than 600 individual devices to monitor, network devices, servers, physical and virtual Windows and Linux devices, we needed an easily scalable software.
Our challenge was to find a tool that would fit our needs, flexible, customizable, easy to use and inexpensive.
We finally opted to try Pandora FMS, a software that undoubtedly exceeded all our expectations.
WHY PANDORA FMS?
One of the main challenges we encountered 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 different forums, however we could not solve it.
With this situation we decided to contact Pandora FMS technical support and in a few hours they found the root of the problem. What we needed was to update the servers from the command line instead of using the web interface.
The rest of the process was very easy since we had a week of training with Pandora FMS professionals. Then we started configuring the system ourselves, adding modules and alerts to the agents that were automatically added by IPAM.
“When our WMI monitors were not responding, we contacted the Pandora FMS support team and got a solution within a few hours.”
Rob Fredette, senior enterprise and network solutions engineer, Nazareth College IT Services
MONITORED DEVICES
SERVERS
NETWORK COMPUTERS
MONITORED DEVICES
SERVERS
NETWORK COMPUTERS
PANDORA FMS BENEFITS
With Pandora FMS we have achieved better functionality, as load times have been reduced; currently the time to reach the web interface on monitor screens is a fraction of the load time we experienced with our previous provider. In addition, we have the ability to set alarms on certain monitored items, which means a reduction in false positive alarms, improving our confidence in the alert system.
Building a new monitoring platform from scratch has allowed us to avoid mistakes made over the years with previous monitoring systems. In previous deployments, most agents and monitors were imported from the old system or generated automatically. Now we can manually select our agents, monitors and alerts, and we can eliminate much of the unnecessary information we carried over from the past.
What we appreciate most is the level of detail in the modules and alarm configurations. Our last vendor relied on a system of ‘alarms for everything’ and adding exceptions, which generated a lot of false positives that undermined our confidence in the alerts we received. With Pandora FMS we have been able to regain that confidence and customize the alarms to what we really need.
“Ease of use is one of the features that led us to choose Pandora FMS as our monitoring platform. With Pandora FMS it’s much easier to see the status of the environment and what items need specific action.”
Rob Fredette, senior enterprise and network solutions engineer, Nazareth College IT Services
Doubts, suggestions or comments?
Does our proposal sound appealing?