For Primus TI, Paessler PRTG is the best employee for monitoring data centers
About Primus TI
Located in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Primus TI has three data centers with specific profiles: production, disaster recovery, and redundancy for protecting customer data. This infrastructure is in the cloud and serves clients in sectors such as education, government, and software houses.
Primus TI offers include computing resources, licensing, connectivity, consultancy, support, monitoring, continuity plans, and data protection, all in a single package. With a history of more than 18 years of providing services in the southern region of Brazil, Primus TI stands out for its technical excellence and knowledge of the business and ICT security environments of each of the companies it serves.
“I often say that PRTG is our best employee, because it works tirelessly 24x7x365 for years. PRTG is both simple and powerful, especially when it comes to meeting more specific needs.”
Glaucio Jardim, CEO of Primus TI
The challenge
In search of a highly professional digital service offering, based on SLAs agreed with the customer, Primus TI needed a powerful monitoring solution that was easy to use and quick to implement in its three data centers. It was impossible to start offering data center-based services without a network monitoring solution.
In addition to the technical reasons, the use of a monitoring solution was essential to add value to Primus TI's offering in a market as competitive as the data center market.
The solution
During the selection phase for a monitoring tool, Primus TI even tested free software solutions for network monitoring. At the end of the day, it came to the conclusion that using free software to monitor an environment as critical as Primus TI's three data centers would not meet the company's management and business demands.
Primus TI managers reflected, for example, on the fact that the cost of a software solution is not always directly financial. The need to maintain a professional to update the free software environment must be taken into account.
If this is not possible, you will have to wait for updates and solutions that are developed by a community or forum. Realizing that this operation would not always happen at the speed required by the business, the managers at Primus TI decided to abandon the free software option and acquire Paessler PRTG Network Monitor.
In addition to the technical excellence of the data center monitoring solution – one of the main criteria for the company's decision – Primus TI considered it essential to have the support and updates of a supplier recognized by the market. Primus TI's managers wanted to work with a monitoring solution that was committed to the client. It was essential to have a supplier that could quickly meet the monitoring demands of Primus TI's three data centers.
PRTG in use
The company uses more than 2,500 PRTG sensors that monitor the use of processing, memory, storage, and network bandwidth, as well as sensors that work at a higher level, constantly querying databases and simulating access to hosted systems in order to detect, among other parameters, increased latency.
Concern about latency – along with security and availability – is one of the pillars of Primus TI's management. Latency is the waiting time between making a request and receiving a response. It is an effective parameter for measuring the experience of using a hosted service. This index has a direct impact on the user experience of the employees and customers of the companies that host their infrastructure in Primus TI data centers.
PRTG maps and dashboards – projected onto Primus TI's NOC screens – show monitoring metrics of the devices and software responsible for supporting the digital processes of the organizations that host their infrastructure in the Primus TI data centers. The company has created two different sets of PRTG maps for its clients – one with a strong technical emphasis, developed for the user company's IT teams. For managers, they created maps that indicate service levels, infrastructure availability, and historical data.
The company also uses PRTG to anticipate possible problems. PRTG has been configured to send alerts preventively before there is a potential unavailability. Primus TI also adopts a predictive approach, focused on unusual behaviors that differ from the base threshold of each sensor.
Increasingly predictive management, and not just reactive management, increases the availability of the environments of the companies served by Primus IT.
In addition to using native PRTG sensors, the Jardim team has built custom PRTG sensors. Primus TI’s professionals have developed sensors that are fully compatible with PRTG in order to process the metrics collected by the customizations created.
The customization cases address the monitoring of specific security resources and processes in their environment. In the opinion of the Primus TI management, the possibility of customizing certain elements of the software helps to further expand the application of PRTG in data centers.
Another important feature for the company was adding more than one external monitoring probe, which reduced false positives in unavailability detections and also increased the speed of diagnosing problems with internet routes.
One of the PRTG sensors customized by Primus TI measures the health of the replication between the servers in the production data center and the servers in the disaster recovery data center. This sensor ensures that each replicated server is actually reachable, has up-to-date data compared to production, is automatically storing historical snapshots and, finally, is ready to go into production if necessary.
“One of our differentiators is to deliver hosting that is always replicated; for this reason, it is essential to ensure that the data is up-to-date in accordance with the RPO, and available.” For Jardim, this breakthrough was achieved easily, thanks to Paessler. “PRTG is both simple and powerful, especially when it comes to meeting more specific needs,” says Glaucio Jardim.
Conclusion
All in all, the maturity of Primus TI's culture is reinforced by PRTG's predictive vision, which points out possible flaws in the digital infrastructure. Maps visually and analytically show the measurements taken by PRTG sensors. Furthermore, the Primus TI team uses customizable PRTG sensors to further extend the reach of Paessler’s solution.
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