HOLT CAT - NetCrunch Success Story

Challenge

Being a sales, service, and parts distribution company with 25 offices spread across three states, communications, both VOIP and data, is key to our operations. Our 2,200 users rely on us to maintain those communications. With a limited staff, we like others, are called upon to be “Jack of all trades, masters of none” so ease of use was a key to the selection. The visual maps provide a quick status on all sites and servers across the company. The ability to restart failed services on the servers has really been a boon allowing us to focus on other issues. It’s very seldom that we walk into a crisis when a service on a critical server has stopped.

Solution

Prior to NetCrunch we relied on WhatsUp Gold to monitor our network. While a good solution, NetCrunch offered a much better visual status of the network as well as the automation of discovery and services management. The ability of NetCrunch to act upon the services is one the key features that NetCrunch easy that we haven’t found in any other solution. While other solutions do say that they can monitor and alert on the services, I haven’t found another solution that can easily restart a service or even a server without complicated scripts and workarounds. This has been a great asset in keeping our exchange servers up and running. NetCrunch provides us an economical solution to make sure our sites and servers where available at all times.

Visual network maps provide a quick view of the overall status of the network. It’s surprising that a map view will catch your attention much better than a straight list. The ability to act on services has been a tremendous help in reducing downtime and mitigating server application downtime. We’ve been looking forward to the release of NetFlow capabilities and are excited about their release in the latest version. This will provide us with stats on the WAN links and help us manage those links.