Paessler PRTG helps Grupo Expansión provide information on the business and finance world
About Grupo Expansión
Grupo Expansión was founded in 1966 with the purpose of providing information on business, finance and everything related to the business world, through specialized publications such as: Expansión, Obras, IDC Seguridad Jurídico Fiscal and Manufacture.
It is one of the most recognized and important groups aimed at selective audiences in Mexico. Until 2014 it was part of the media giant Time Warner, specifically the publishing division, Time Inc. In 2007 it launched, together with the news network CNN, a website specialized in economics, finance, and business. The site was called CNNExpansion.com, successfully adapting the CNNmoney.com model to the Hispanic market.
In 2011, Grupo Expansión had intermittent availability of its IT infrastructure due to high internet bandwidth consumption, as well as incidents on the hosting site that caused crashes, temperature, humidity, lighting, and energy ups and downs. So the company acquired substantial improvements in UPS in order to maintain operational continuity. This was not enough since the magazines had to be always available for the readers.
“PRTG allowed us to improve our IT infrastructure availability, which translated into business continuity for the company by reducing failures and improving measures based on reliable and real metrics for smart decision making.”
Rodrigo Arroyo Lara, Telecommunications and IT Security Manager, Grupo Expansión
The challenge
Grupo Expansión set itself the task of finding the best infrastructure monitoring solution and looked at Nagios, SolarWinds, and Paessler. It selected Paessler PRTG Network Monitor.
“We had to have everything under control to be proactive and not reactive in order to foresee and avoid incidents. We chose Paessler's solution PRTG because of its support, ease of use, and advanced features, where the determining factor was its outstanding web interface,” says Rodrigo Arroyo Lara, Telecommunications and IT Security Manager at Grupo Expansión.
The solution
“Now, with PRTG, we have sensors (measurement points) that give us total control of what is happening in our IT infrastructure, and thus solve problems before they occur. We monitor everything from communication links, switches, routers, firewalls, UPS power, temperature, humidity, and lighting,” said Rodrigo Arroyo.
Paessler's software alerts via notifications, for example via email and SMS, and warns in advance if there is saturation in any part of the network. In addition to its traffic lights system, PRTG displays maps in a web environment on screens that the end user can read in a very easy and simple way.
Currently, Grupo Expansión has an installation of 1,300 configured sensors (e.g. Ping, SNMP Traffic, custom and uptime sensors, ports, CPU, memory, disk utilization, HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, NTP, SSH, MS SQL, DNS) in a hardware environment consisting of a single central server and two remote probes for distributed network monitoring.
PRTG in use
Grupo Expansión monitors the following aspects:
- Data links: internet and private lines (capacity, usage, packet loss, limits to anticipate saturation)
- Equipment consuming more links by means of packet sniffing
- 40 network switches, 8 routers, and 2 firewalls
- 12 power equipment devices: UPS (load percentage, input/output voltages and currents, all with defined thresholds with operating values)
- 11 integrations with sensors to measure temperature and humidity
- VoIP telephony: monitoring of servers and cards (CLAN), as well as quality parameters such as packet loss in remote offices (Jitter)
- 120 servers in general (Ping, CPU, memory, network traffic)
- VMware: virtual machine monitoring
- 20 websites: page monitoring (Ping, download, SSL certificate expiration) via corporate internet and via a residential FTTH line, to know how the sites respond from inside the company as well as for an end user from home/company
The benefits
For Grupo Expansión, there are several advantages of using Paessler's solution. Rodrigo Arroyo points out: “It gives us peace of mind to have everything monitored, to control something intangible, and to anticipate any inconvenience. It gives us confidence and peace of mind that we transmit to our internal users.”
“Another fundamental benefit is that by monitoring the IT infrastructure, it allows us to develop strategies for the company's growth, that is, to make business intelligence,” the executive adds.
This way, the group learns about trends such as the load of a UPS or temperature rise in a data center and can prevent errors. PRTG will also improve the service levels (SLA) of applications and internal services, and even optimize response times in dealing with bottlenecks.
Conclusion
Rodrigo Arroyo is very satisfied with using PRTG because it is a solution that makes it easy for him to manage devices, increase the number of sensors, monitor the entire network reliably, and master false positives to the maximum by monitoring through two mechanisms. “We will continue to work with Paessler now and in the near future,” concludes Arroyo Lara.
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