Boughey Distribution Ltd. Delivers in Time with PRTG

Company Profile

David Busby is the Network Administrator for Boughey Distribution Ltd, a large warehousing and distribution company located in the West Midlands, UK. As a service company, they rely heavily on their IT infrastructure, both to drive the heart of their business, and allow them to provide the services that their customers require.

Boughey’s system relies heavily on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Load Planning software that interfaces with their main database servers. Round the clock availability and high performance are of critical importance.

Challenge

Over a period of twelve months, Boughey saw massive growth in demand for their services, resulting in the company having to take on a large number of additional staff, one of whom was David Busby. Additional staff led to more workstations, more simultaneous users, and increased data transit and load on the network as a whole.

The growth also resulted in an increase in the customer base, resulting in yet more records in the databases, and more database transactions taking place across the network.

David noted that by the time he was hired, the network had effectively outgrown itself, with network-wide performance issues, and no effective way to check where the bottlenecks were occurring.

In his search for a solution, David turned to MRTG, yet found this to be far from ideal.

“After deploying MRTG, I found myself having to deal with the day to day running of the Network and correcting issues as they occurred. I simply did not have time to be creating and editing MRTG config files and custom PHP scripts to pull out the time periods I needed to generate assessment reports for the company directors.”

Far from being an effective solution, MRTG quickly started to add to David’s workload.

Solution

In his search for a more effective solution, David turned to PRTG, and was quickly impressed by its easy to use GUI and reporting features. Within a short time of deploying the trial version, David requested and received approval for PRTG’s purchase.

Using PRTG, David was able to quickly and effectively identify where the bottlenecks were occurring, and not only with data transit. PRTG also enabled him to identify another problem; that the old server was being heavily over taxed, and that the CPU's were almost consistently at 100% usage.

As well as being able to identify these problems, PRTG’s easy to read graphs also proved to be invaluable.

“Thanks to PRTG I was able to point to massive performance increases, and show that the CPU's were no longer under constant high use, thereby future proofing the solution.”

This in turn led to the approval of capital expenditure and implementation of new hardware, resulting in a vastly more efficient and improved network.

Today, Boughey’s network is far more effective, yet the company are still actively using PRTG. Automatically generated reports mailed to David allow him to ensure that no further bottlenecks occur, and also allow him to predict where future problems may occur by analyzing growth trends in usage and transit data.

David is in no doubt as to how effective a solution PRTG has proved to be.

“PRTG has increased my productivity by ten fold at least. It allows for diagnosis of performance issues by generating a report of the time period in which performance issues occurred, all of which is quickly and easily carried out through the GUI, with no fuss and no need for additional scripting!”

When asked whether he would recommend Paessler to a friend or colleague?

“I already have, in fact I believe they have already purchased a licence".