Paessler PRTG monitors the sweet spots in the IT infrastructure of Carambar & Co

About Carambar & Co

Carambar & Co was founded on May 2, 2017. The company, agile and innovative, employs nearly 1000 people, spread over five production sites all in France: in Blois, Marcq-en-Baroeul, Saint-Genest, Strasbourg and Vichy. It is a 100% French-owned company with a fantastic portfolio of local and global brands within its large portfolio – brands like Carambar, Poulain, La Pie qui Chante, Suchard, Vichy, Malabar, Terry‘s, Kaba, Dulciora, Benco and Suchard Express.

To stabilize, improve reliability and optimize the performance of its Information System (IS), the new food and beverage group Carambar & Co decided to install an IT monitoring solution. PRTG Network Monitor by Paessler was chosen by Carambar’s CIO, Marc Boullier for its ease of implementation and daily efficiency. The integration partner CVC IT advised Carambar & Co how to leverage the solution for optimal use.

“Our objective was to be able to monitor the health of our most critical servers containing data and applications, but also the flows and bandwidth between headquarters, our 50 servers in the cloud and the 15 servers at our production sites. For us, it is essential to have a proactive approach to understand where the weaknesses of the Information System are to be able to improve them.”

Marc Boullier, CIO of Carambar & Co

Server & flow monitoring to ensure high-quality information

Carambar & Co was founded in May 2017 following the sale of the Mondelez group to Eurazeo - a flagship French confectionery brand. To run this new company of more than 1000 employees, an Information System had to be created from scratch with an on-site SAP ERP and a number of applications in the cloud. Once this hybrid IS was successfully implemented, the company‘s Information Systems Director, Marc Boullier, sought to improve reliability and performance using an IT monitoring solution.

"Our objective was to be able to monitor the health of our most critical servers containing data and applications, but also the flows and bandwidth between headquarters, our 50 servers in the cloud and the 15 servers at our production sites. For us, it is essential to have a proactive approach to understand where the weaknesses of the Information System are to be able to improve them. It also helps us to prevent malfunctions and informs us immediately of an incident, so we can resolve it before users become aware of it." explains Marc Boullier, CIO of Carambar & Co.

PRTG was an obvious choice from the first test onwards

Carambar & Co decided to test several monitoring solutions at the end of 2017 and PRTG quickly established itself as the most efficient and easiest to use.

"We decided to install PRTG on a laptop just before the weekend, and we saw the results the following Monday: within two days the solution had discovered the entire IS. It automatically installed more than 1000 sensors and put alerts in place. It was magical compared to other more manual solutions that we had tested; some had required the installation of 40 sensors manually. Our teams are not experts in monitoring, but we were able to understand the DNA of the product very quickly, helped along by the guidance available directly in the PRTG web interface."

The CIO contacted CRIS Réseaux, Paessler’s Value Added Distributor, who managed the migration from trial version to a commercial PRTG license, guaranteeing no service interruption or productivity loss. The product and service came at a very reasonable budget considering the potential return. „After a month of testing, we had done enough to know the license size we needed. We didn‘t want to lose anything we set up during the 30-day trial, and CRIS Réseaux helped us to achieve this.”

The benefits of using PRTG

In took less than two weeks to completely install PRTG, including the creation of dashboards – this is nothing compared to other solutions, which can take months of deployment.

The integration partner CVC IT, recommended by CRIS Réseaux, helped Carambar & Co to take PRTG to a new level. They advised on monitoring strategies to better manage the alerts and optimize operations. This made it possible to respond to concrete business cases by making the data visible in dashboards, as well as sending data to logs and databases.

"PRTG has become an essential tool for the ten people who use it to manage IT. We have a complete view of all IT activity in a single dashboard, which greatly simplifies our search for faults; optimizing our use of resource. We are alerted in real time before a server is overloaded and we uncover faults that are otherwise difficult to detect, such as problems with badge readers at the factory entrance.

The PRTG feature indicating “unusual” behavior is very useful to detect what we should be monitoring more closely. And what is very important to me, as CIO, is that we can communicate the health of IT to every department in the company. This demonstrates our mastery of the IT Infrastructure, putting the IT department in a very positive light," explains Marc Boullier.

Conclusion

The company is currently in the process of optimizing the most critical flows. For 2018, Carambar & Co plans to use PRTG even more extensively, deploying sensors to monitor their factory operations. The objective is to alert maintenance engineers within the factories to potential issues, so they are able to better control the operation of connected objects, applications and production lines. The first tests have already begun in the Strasbourg factory, and the technology will be rolled out to other factories if tests are successful.

"Our next step is to support the industry 4.0 movement and monitor the IoT equipment that will, without question, be used in our production plants in France. We will use PRTG to manage and make factory operations more reliable," concludes Marc Boullier.

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