CROUS Paris provides education and housing services to more than 300,000 students over 80 locations in France. Each year, its 750 employees prepare five million meals, find housing for 6,000 students and process 60,000 scholarship applications. In order to support such a high volume of activity on a network with more than 1000 different IT devices, Mr. Yu, Information Systems Director at CROUS Paris, needed an infrastructure monitoring solution.
His teams were spending a huge amount of time manually diagnosing their servers to find the root causes of various malfunctions and performance issues. He sought out an infrastructure monitoring tool that was both simple and efficient. The goal of this was to free up the IT team to work proactively instead of reactively.
Free Tools Are Not Always Free
Mr. Yu evaluated both a free tool and Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold infrastructure monitoring software. He chose Ipswitch to get the benefits of licensed software because even free tools are not entirely free to own. This reasoning included factoring in a lack of regular updates, technical support and training. Additionally, key criteria leading to his decision included ease of use, clear reporting, and a practical management interface.
The deployment across CROUS’ IT infrastructure was staggered over 2 weeks. The IT team now easily identifies and addresses issues on their networks, servers and applications – oftentimes before they impact end users. Reports are generated every morning that provide a clear view of server status and the network as a whole.
“WhatsUp Gold lets us solve any given problem quickly and easily. We no longer need to connect to every server to locate a malfunction. This helps prevent bottlenecks and minimize impact.” – Mr. Yu, IS Director, CROUS Paris
Infrastructure monitoring has led to genuine gains in time and increased visibility over the network. And not only is the network easier to manage, but so is Mr. Yu’s team. They can more efficiently identify issues and malfunctions, which saves them time they can then devote to other projects that sorely need their attention.
How IT Pros Can Save 30 Minutes a Day
Have you looked at your team’s daily task list lately? Do you have all the hours you need to deploy new hardware, patch systems, deal with the Windows 10 update and everything else? If you need more time in your day, check out our recent webcast on replay to learn how you can lighten the administrative load.
Get tips on how to cut-down on IT time-wasters associated with:
- Configuration and change management across the infrastructure
- Supporting and customizing multiple IT monitoring solutions
- Documenting proof of compliance with regulatory standards
- Managing inventory, down to the component level