Energy Transfer Partners Migrated from MRTG to PRTG

Company Profile

Energy Transfer Partners is a publicly traded partnership owning and operating a diversified portfolio of energy assets, as the fourth largest retail marketer of propane in the United States. Darrin Hert serves as the company's IT Support/Engineering Operations Manager. He designs and implements all major technology systems at Energy Transfer Partners, as well as manages the personnel that maintain and support them. His IT department handles many things, including workstations/servers, telco, wiring and WAN/LAN.

The Challenge

Hert says setting up trending mechanisms in MRTG was taking a considerable amount of time. Furthermore, it was very difficult -- requiring scripts -- to overlay data from one sensor on another. Also, he needed to have accurate gauge data for rapidly changing items. "MRTG was much more cumbersome to implement new monitoring points (sensors), especially on the Windows environment," says Hert.

The Solution

"PRTG Traffic Grapher has saved a lot of time. I have only scratched the surface of the application, but I am currently using it to monitor several new servers that are being put in place," says Hert. "PRTG makes it very easy to add new sensors and to logically organize them."

Though he had already created a system with MRTG, the main reason he decided to use PRTG was because the accuracy of some of his MRTG collection points was not very good, requiring a much more frequent sampling rate. "PRTG was able to do this in a much more efficient manner. PRTG's Web server allows me to deploy viewports into the collected data with access control. With PRTG, I can also manipulate the graphs on-the-fly and view multiple sensors together quickly and accurately. This is great for overlaying sensors on top of each other to more accurately diagnose problems or anomalies," says Hert.

He advises: "When using PRTG to monitor Windows machines, I'd recommend creating your sensors first, and giving them different names, and then later applying the sensors to graphs on the panels. When naming your sensors, I've found it best to name them as 'device_type' (i.e. SERVER1_cpu1, SERVER1_dskC, SERVER2_cpu1, etc.). This makes them easier to locate when picking the sensors to add to the graphs."

About Paessler Router Traffic Grapher

PRTG Traffic Grapher is an easy-to-use application for Windows that monitors bandwidth usage and other network parameters, including memory and CPU usages, via Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). It provides system administrators with real-time data and usage trends in graphical form. PRTG Traffic Grapher serves as an invaluable tool to aid in optimizing the efficiency, layout and setup of leased lines, routers, firewalls, servers and other SNMP-enabled network components.