Network monitoring ensures smooth operations

Hume Bank, which operates in north-eastern Victoria and southern NSW, has a network of 19 branches and 47 ATMs and approximately 150 staff.

The core of the bank’s customer-centred approach is the provision of fast and convenient service. With this in mind, Hume Bank sought to gain greater insight into its IT networks to help maintain a highly available platform for the business and its customers.

Following recommendation by a third-party supplier, Hume Bank chose to trial a free version of Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor to gain insight into traffic availability on its branch network. On seeing what the solution could do and the benefits it could bring beyond simply monitoring network links, the bank reviewed the cost and scope of the solution’s features versus the competing products, and chose to fully implement the solution across its enterprise.

Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor is a monitoring solution for LANs, WANs, servers, websites, applications, URLs and more. The product is capable of monitoring virtually any kind of device, application or service, helping IT professionals identify potential outages before they occur as well as removing system bottlenecks and maximising use of system resources.

“PRTG Network Monitor is very simple to deploy,” said Brad Mennen, systems administrator, Hume Bank. “We were even able to customise the software to suit our own business needs; for example, we customised some of the reports we receive from PRTG and developed custom executables for sensors and the issuing of alerts via SMS message.”

Hume Bank installed PRTG on a Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system within its virtual infrastructure, supported by two CPUs and 8 GB of memory. Monitoring a whole host of servers, switches, routers and applications - and even printers, ATMs and EFTPOS - all aspects of network monitoring for the bank were covered using just under 900 sensors.

“With PRTG we can even keep an eye on response times for loading web pages for the public-facing internet banking site, via both desktop and mobile, so when a problem arises it can be dealt with swiftly and efficiently to reduce any impact to our customers,” said Mennen.

Each data centre and all of the bank’s branches and ATM networks are covered by PRTG. If an ATM goes down in Albury, for instance, the bank is alerted immediately so that the problem can be resolved quickly; similarly, if there is an issue with EFTPOS links in Sydney, the bank will be alerted to take action and repercussions for its customers or the wider business can be kept to a minimum.

PRTG Network Monitor has given Hume Bank much greater insight into the availability of its systems, network and the availability of services it provides. As a result, it has helped the organisation predict and resolve issues before they become bigger problems that could potentially affect viability to internal and external customers. As a result, the bank has made significant time and financial savings through reducing IT administrative time and cost of outages.

“PRTG provides us with an always-on second set of eyes that lets us know when something in our network isn’t right. As a result of our viability of services being measured, it helps us better allocate time and resources to improving areas that may need attention,” said Mennen.

Image courtesy GotCredit under CC