Diocese of Ballarat deploys Paessler PRTG for IT monitoring

Diocese of Ballarat Catholic Education Limited (DOBCEL) has deployed a Paessler PRTG solution to monitor its network covering 57 schools in the Ballarat region.

DOBCEL had previously lacked centralised infrastructure management or monitoring which caused its IT personnel to travel to schools experiencing IT issues or outages or implement essential patches.

Since Ballarat is a large geographical area, this often involved return journeys of between ten to twelve hours.  

“...DOBCEL was using both SolarWinds and Spiceworks to monitor individual systems or school environments, but it was quite haphazard and didn't provide the IT team with good telemetry for decision-making purposes,” said Damian Foster, manager of IT and cybersecurity at DoBCEL.

Paessler PRTG has allowed the organisation to perform remote maintenance and patching tasks, while the solution's dashboard provides data on outages that allows them to be resolved more quickly, DOBCEL said.

Capacity planning also allows DOBCEL to identify trends and data on a daily basis.

“Availability and performance issues soon become evident when something isn't functioning, affecting the interconnected systems. The ability to see the network’s performance level, including how many devices are connected to an access point and what kind of flow through it is getting on its switching uplinks is extremely valuable to our IT support team,” said Foster.  

DOBCEL decided to customise its dashboards to ensure it was only sending its support team urgent alerts about data that directly impacted the running of the core network.

Monitoring for less critical on-premise systems was removed from PRTG, which enabled DOBCEL's IT team to make better reactionary decisions regarding an outage.

"PRTG gives us comprehensive visibility into the post-installation infrastructure of DOBCEL, which we monitor daily. This allows us to view the infrastructure as a dynamic, continuously evolving system" said Paul Jans, CFO and assistant director of business services at DOBCEL.

DOBCEL’s IT team uses a remote management tool to manage its patching and Windows updates across the organisation.

PRTG sends notifications after ‘patch Tuesday’ to say that the systems are fully patched and that sometimes some bad patches have failed and need very specific problem resolution.  

“PRTG has allowed DOBCEL to put a ring-fence around a previously sprawling and haphazardly designed IT environment while we design an infrastructure program that standardises our school environments," said Foster.

"This enables us to design more robust systems that minimise loss of learning and teaching hours for students and staff because the technology works reliably. And in the event that it does fail, we can quickly identify and resolve the issue."