Santa Clara University Migrated from What's Up to IPCheck

About Santa Clara University

Located in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Santa Clara University is a Catholic, Jesuit university with approximately 8,200 undergraduate and graduate students and nearly 1,500 faculty and staff. SCU offers a rigorous undergraduate curriculum in the arts and sciences, business, and engineering. It has nationally recognized graduate and professional schools in business, law, engineering, pastoral ministries, and counseling psychology and education.

The Challenge

SCU is currently running Paessler’s IPCheck Server Monitor on a Dell PowerEdge 1650 server running Windows 2003. Paul Schandel, System Administrator for SCU, came across IPCheck while doing a search for server monitoring tools. The problem that drove him to look for a solution was with SSL key validation. Schandel’s department had other monitoring software in place, all of which had limitations when it came to SSL keys. SCU also has What’s Up Gold running, but this product does not provide them with the capability to effectively check for the problem they were encountering.

The Solution

Schandel says that IPCheck has helped resolve the problem by being able to ignore SSL errors that are generated by the web server because the SSL key common name does not match the web server’s hostname. “We are now able to do SSL checks to verify the service and content are both up and running,” said Schandel. “And we get timely notifications if they fail to run, thus keeping our secure area up and allowing more students to submit applications.” These errors occur when doing direct SSL key checks to the server and bypassing the load balancer.

Customer Benefit

Schandel says that SCU has experienced some non-anticipated benefits of using IPCheck. “Weekly reports with uptime of each server is wonderful,” he said. “I was so delighted when I saw that. I instantly sent the report off to the director of our department, who was thrilled. Of course he wanted more (i.e. monthly and yearly), but was just as happy to see it did such a thing.”

Because of the content level checking, Schandel’s department was also able to identify when other services outside of the web server were hanging and causing an indirect outage. “It has helped by letting us know of a problem in a more timely fashion and before the end users see the problem,” said Schandel. “It has also helped by giving us more uptime, better service to the user, and giving my department a better image.”

Schandel says that he would recommend IPCheck to friends and colleagues. “For my dollar I don’t believe there is a more effective product for service monitoring,” he said. “Recently, we upgraded to the latest version of What’s Up. I asked the question, ‘can you properly do SSL checks yet?’ The answer was no. I don’t think we’ll ever leave IPCheck.”

About Paessler IPCheck Server Monitor

IPCheck Server Monitor from Paessler is a Windows-based network uptime and downtime monitoring software. IPCheck Server Monitor makes it easy and affordable to detect network and Web site failures early, minimizing downtime and avoiding economic impact.