Swinerton Incorporated Increases Employee Productivity With PRTG!

Company Profile

Through offices in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Washington, Swinerton Incorporated offers construction services throughout the Western United States to a diverse range of business clients that demand exacting performance. The hallmark of Swinerton's success for over a century of business is the principle of exceeding its clients' expectations through innovative construction and outstanding customer service.

Challenge

Brandon Marrott, a network administrator at Swinerton, and the Swinerton Networking Team found themselves passively reacting to system failures as they were reported to them. 

Swinerton's network team operates a traditional spoke-and-wheel configuration and was sometimes overwhelmed with watching servers, services, applications, routers and switches over a large WAN that extends from Hawaii to Florida.  Their data center is in Northern California, while 14 branch offices are connected by T1s and another 30 remote job sites are connected by VPN over high-speed Internet connections. 

The Swinerton Network Team simply wanted to be more proactive in resolving system failures within their cross-country WAN.  The team tried, in fact, to be more proactive by employing various single-purpose utilities and vendor-provided services such as network monitoring that “tended to be very expensive”.  Neither option was very successful.

Solution

Today, the Swinerton Network Team is proactively identifying critical system failures with Paessler’s IPCheck and PRTG Traffic Grapher.  The Swinerton team was initially impressed with the complementary products' comprehensive functionality and now uses them to monitor 90% of all application availability, as well as to identify when services became unavailable or unresponsive.

Swinerton, for instance, can now monitor its multiple locations with IPCheck's secure Remote Probes and perform truly proactive trend analysis with IPCheck's many reporting options.  The team can also get live network readings with PRTG's SNMP sensors. Bandwidth and usage monitoring have assisted in the maintenance of their Wide Area Network.

Customer Benefits

The Swinerton network team has reduced the amount of lost employee productivity -- and employee frustration with the network staff -- that stems from network outages.

The Swinerton Networking Team is now “on top of” maintaining a reliable and redundant network and respond quickly to outages.  The team spends less time on monitoring and troubleshooting connectivity problems.

As for the department's bottom line, IPCheck and PRTG were cost-efficient investments.  No other products on the market, Marrott said, could offer Swinerton as much as IPCheck and PRTG at such a “reasonable price. We would absolutely recommend the Paessler IPCheck and PRTG to any group that needs to monitor the availability and connectivity of network resources.”