Venture Capitalist Saves Money With PRTG

Company Profile

Accel is a venture capital company of some 25 years standing. It invests mainly in technology companies and has offices in London and Palo Alto, California. Rogier Boeken is the IT manager in the London office and has been with the company for 5 years.

Accel relies on smooth operation of its data network for communication between staff and offices and it is essential that this facility runs smoothly and efficiently at all times.

Challenge

One of the most important things for Rogier is that he can quickly determine the bandwidth usage levels of the data network.

The company's personnel work both in the office and occasionally from home and, as so much work is done by computer, staff notice if things are not running as smoothly as usual - especially if speed is the issue. Rogier always checks the network side of things before investigating further

Solution

In searching for a solution via the world wide web Rogier found a forum where participants were asking how to monitor bandwidth usage. Among the replies was the open source MRTG and in looking at this he also found Paessler's PRTG. And because it promised to be up and running in just a few minutes from download and given that the cost was easily affordable (currently it is €79,95 for 25 nodes) - a 'no brainer' as Rogier described it - he opted for the Paessler product. "It offered great value then and it still does." he said.

Rogier has been using the product for 3-4 years if not longer and he's more than satisfied with it - he updates as and when new versions become available.

"I'm really happy with what PRTG gives me. It does exactly what I want it to do. I checked by doing a Google search about six months ago and most people said that the Paessler product was still one of the better ones. I feel very confident that I still have the right product, at the right price - I am sure there are very expensive products out there that can do a lot more, but I don't want that. I want what PRTG is doing and I don't want to pay for functionality that I don't need."

Rogier became aware of his need for the application when doing bandwidth intensive video conferencing over IP, when issues, including bandwidth consumption came to the fore. He commented, "I realised I had no way of quickly determining how much bandwidth we were consuming in realtime. Most ISPs offer a portal where you can get this information, but it is usually very basic and requires you to go through hoops to get to it. It's much easier to have a console running it and hop onto it whenever you need to view."

Although it is difficult to gauge just how helpful to the business Paessler's PRTG has been Rogier considers it to be very effective and useful tool. The company's bandwidth usage has increased substantially over the last few years and PRTG allows for the monitoring of the consumption and increase capacity before it reaches the threshold where a problem occurs. "So," said Rogier, " it is helping the business run smoothly as we're able to anticipate likely bandwidth problems."

He finds the email alert when bandwidth consumption goes over a certain threshold particularly valuable - he doesn't need to logon to check on things, he know's he'll get an alert. Equally useful to Rogier is the report function, which gives daily, weekly, and monthly overviews so giving the whole picture as and when needed.

And the program has also been able to assist in cutting costs by moving DSL connections from uncapped plans to capped plans. "When I looked at bandwidth usage I was able to cut the costs in half by ordering a more cost beneficial package from our ISP." he said, "It's rather nice to cut a bill by 50%."

Such is his confidence in PRTG that Rogier has had no hesitation in recommending it to peers who were looking at bandwidth consumption monitoring and he says that some have converted from the open source MRTG to Paessler's PRTG.

One great advantage of PRTG was the speed from download to use. "I had my Paessler product running in less than 10 minutes. Obviously it depends on how many nodes you are running and it can take a couple of minutes per node. But I only monitored 4-5 to begin with for internet connection and it was done in less than 10 minutes.

"Over the next two or three months I added all of the servers, that probably took another half hour. Then last year I decided to monitor all our office nodes, and then the home networks to get a full bandwidth consumption picture. I suppose I spent about half an hour each session - but it hardly felt like any time at all."

To have all of this functionality, to have instant access to detailed facts and figures in an easy to understand format makes Rogier Boeken's working life much easier and problems that might have occurred don't as he gets prior warning.