Real-time monitoring and network management

Acurus provides internet and carriage services to its customers through its own national private ISP network, for which real-time monitoring and ongoing network management is provided via its Network Operations Centre (NOC).

The network is connected to all major Australian telecommunications carriers, global cloud providers and additional service providers to deliver a high-performance communication platform. It provides ISP as a service (ISPaaS), cloud connectivity, network as a service (NaaS) and managed private national network services.

Acurus found itself held back by a slow network monitoring and reporting process. The system was complex to update and impacted the company’s ability to adjust quickly and deliver quality service.

The challenge

Acurus wanted to provide monitoring as a service (MaaS) for its managed national private network to pinpoint any issues quicker, to ensure they did not impact the performance of its clients’ technology services delivered to their end consumers.

It had a requirement to monitor its ports, switches, routers, WAN, LAN, applications, servers, hardware, bandwidth, storage, firewalls, hard drives and also virtual environments, and selected PRTG around eight years ago to manage this highly complex task.

The challenge of maintaining segregation and read-only access to its customers’ probes was important to Acurus and PRTG was going to be able to provide a granular permissions policy, assisting the company in providing its monitoring services to its customers while also ensuring their security and privacy.

The solution

The implementation of PRTG solved many of the challenges Acurus previously faced and allowed the company to focus on giving its customers timely solutions that could be adapted to suit their needs.

“When Acurus first looked at PRTG, the feature which we found the most compelling was the simplicity of the platform,” said Steven Hall, Head of Consulting at Acurus. “The simple user interface and dashboard, built-in responsive web design and native phone applications all enabled us to simplify our own operations, deployment, configuration and ongoing upkeep of the monitoring platform. PRTG also enabled us to heavily customise and perform highly detailed monitoring, both of which are essential elements of our managed services.”

Acurus uses PRTG to ensure:

1. Core IT infrastructure availability
2. Core IT infrastructure performance
3. Network availability
4. Network bandwidth usage
5. Firewall interfaces
6. MSSQL server performance
7. Public cloud services (AWS and Microsoft Azure services)
8. Active Directory and detailed queries
9. Custom application availability
10. Custom application performance to report on service-level agreements (SLAs).

The benefits

Using PRTG allows Acurus to monitor its customers’ entire ICT environment including applications across all data centres, cloud and on-premise environments.

Enhanced reporting solves multiple issues

Acurus has simplified the process required to monitor the uptime and performance of firewalls and routers at its customers’ sites. PRTG provides not just uptime and interface statistics, but bandwidth and sFlow information, giving full visibility into customer systems including how bandwidth is being used and which endpoints and applications have the highest usage.

Enhanced reporting enables granular alerting and notifications, which delivers a proactive monitoring service.

“We have found these sophisticated levels of monitoring to be highly effective, improving the end user’s experience of the systems and applications in use, giving us the opportunity to provide a proactive resolution rather than having the end user raise problems,” said Saif Akil, Head of Service Management at Acurus.

SLA reporting for its clients

Using PRTG has enabled Acurus to automate SLA reporting. Every system failure or downtime event could lead to an impact on its customers’ services and therefore high availability is always essential. PRTG has also provided Acurus with the ability to share the SLA reports with its customers to ensure clarity and accountability, enhancing its overall managed services.

During the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 Acurus, like many organisations, needed to operate in a new, physically disconnected way. Its NOC adapted quickly and, working with the specialist team of engineers in Melbourne, was able to view the PRTG dashboard remotely.

By providing its customers with these comprehensive monitoring features through PRTG, Acurus offers a 360-degree view of customer ICT availability and performance, allowing them to focus on running their businesses.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/kentoh