Paessler PRTG provides Foxtons with deep insights into its IT estate
About Foxtons
Foxtons Group, a sales and lettings estate agency is renowned in the UK for setting the standard in property. Over the last 38 years the company has built a network of around 60 branches, and an annual revenue of £93.5 million. Supporting the business is a strong operational infrastructure that enables its teams to achieve the highest standards in delivering exceptional service to its customers.
Like many major companies with an IT estate, Foxtons had various tools in place all running in separate silos but it wanted a centralised solution to unify the monitoring of certain aspects of its estate. To address this challenge, Gurdip Kundi, Infrastructure Director at Foxtons, and his team were already using a combination of other software solutions but felt they didn’t quite tick all the boxes.
Kundi explained: “We were looking for a tool that would provide us with good clarity in terms of monitoring as well as something that’s quite flexible that Foxtons could grow with rather than being quite rigid.”
“We have a modern infrastructure and toolset and we do look to evolve over time. Monitoring is very key to any platform so I think PRTG is going to help us size, monitor, and keep a close eye on our primary operations and our key line of business applications. We always try and prepare not just for now, but also for the future and PRTG enables us to do that.”
Gurdip Kundi, Infrastructure Director, Foxtons
Enter PRTG
As a result, Foxtons turned to Paessler PRTG Network Monitor, initially taking out a free trial. But, once the company experienced the benefits of the platform, it signed up to a perpetual licence and soon extended its use across more areas of the organisation to cover all key platforms across Foxtons.
Kundi explained: “We did a free trial, and proof of concept first and then we realised that this solution was something we wanted to go forward with as it was best placed to fit our needs. Paessler supported us well during the proof of concept and trial stages. We chose PRTG because of the product not necessarily because of price.”
Today, the IT team has at its disposal a large commercial PRTG license allowing them up to 10,000 sensors to monitor their Wintel environment, server estate, CPU usage, memory as well more advanced aspects of the technology infrastructure such as core services and platforms that run underlying to that. Kundi added: “Paessler demonstrated what could be done, and supported us initially, but in terms of what was good for us to use but the system is quite intuitive so our team was fairly confident to set up a lot of it themselves.”
The business benefits
Since installing PRTG, Kundi and his team have been monitoring several thresholds and certain key services which are bespoke to Foxtons’ environment. Kundi says that his team are already seeing the benefits: “Since we’ve started using PRTG, we’ve already been able to see an impact in terms of the improved visibility of our estate, presenting a unified single pane of glass experience. PRTG has proved to be a valuable tool and it’s one of those solutions that allows you to grow as your needs change.”
The use of PRTG has also led to a much more proactive approach by helping the IT team spot issues and trends much sooner, which has been a major benefit so far. It now has greater clarity in terms of ownership and better visibility in terms of being able to identify any issues with Foxtons production systems or memory spikes. This has helped significantly in terms of being more efficient and being able to address alerts.
Kundi said: “I think it’s a very adaptable platform and it has integration into Teams which makes it very effective for notifications. We’re going to be doing some advanced scripting which is where PRTG can be quite powerful.”
Conclusion
The IT team appreciates that it can improve its problem solving by looking at historical trends using PRTG and being able to find out what was affected when and then identify the root cause directly. Like any business, Foxtons can’t afford for its corporate networks and infrastructure to go down – it’s far too costly for the organisation. One of the benefits that PRTG offers is ensuring a much more robust monitoring platform that can alert the IT team more swiftly to reduce the downtime in Foxtons data center environment dramatically.
“I would recommend PRTG for ease of use, ease of management and administration and for the variety it offers in terms of a monitoring platform. It’s a very modern tool that doesn’t just monitor one environment, it can monitor a vast number of environments with a huge number of sensors. It can evolve as our business and our needs evolve,” Kundi concluded.
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