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For 18 years, The Hartfiel Company has served customers
in the Upper Midwest from a single facility near
Minneapolis. In 2002, it began to expand its sights
dramatically and, over the next few years, opened
facilities in Iowa, Kansas and Texas. As the company
grew and its product line expanded, its IT network became
more sophisticated with features like online credit card
processing for customers and Voice over IP (VoIP) for
internal communications. Eventually, Jeremy Pederson,
director of IT, decided to implement a network monitoring
solution that would give him a bird's-eye view of
the routers, switches and servers that hold the network
together.
Pederson had several prerequisites. It couldn't cost a
fortune. It had to be easy to use and couldn't require
a lot of internal maintenance. It also had to archive
months of monitoring data so Pederson could spot trends
and correctly plan for future capacity needs.
Pederson evaluated numerous options, including HP OpenView,
Silverback (by way of a managed service provider), several
Linux-based "freeware" solutions that, in reality, required
expensive front-end applications, and Jumpnode. Only
Jumpnode met his requirements.
"Every other option I looked at was going to require
a dedicated server," Pederson notes. "I have 22 servers
already and don't need another one. With Jumpnode, all you
do is plug in an appliance and five minutes later, you're
configuring critical checks. Within a couple of hours, I
had most of my critical checks up and running."
Pederson also found Jumpnode's architecture and its Dashboard
interface to be "superior by leaps and bounds over everyone
else. It's web-based, and I can access it anywhere. There are
no special programs you have to install. And it shows you
what's going on throughout your whole environment."
The icing on the cake, says Pederson, is the fact that
Jumpnode offers unlimited data retention for customers, so it
saves customers the trouble of doing their own backups. Other
systems kept data for weeks at most. One only offered seven
days of historical information. You need months of historical
data to plan and figure out what to buy in the future,"
Pederson says. "With Jumpnode, I'll have that information
forever—or for as long as I'm a customer."
Hartfiel uses Jumpnode to monitor disk space, CPUs, RAM,
routers, servers and switches at all of its locations. On
numerous occasions, Jumpnode has alerted Pederson to
brewing problems and allowed him to proactively solve them.
"I could probably give you 50 examples of how Jumpnode has
made solving issues faster and easier," he says.
One important role Jumpnode plays is monitoring and helping
to maintain its VoIP system, which puts significant demands
on its remote networks. With Jumpnode, Pederson is the first
to know if there are issues with the system and doesn't have
to rely on his VoIP vendor. Jumpnode also allows Pederson
to graph metrics like bandwidth across his multiple WAN links
and summarize his efforts in ways that executive management
can understand.
"I also like the fact that I don't have to call Jumpnode
to configure the system," Pederson says. "I am in complete
control." The executive reports are also easy to understand
and read, he notes. "Right in the subject line of the email
is all the info I need," he says. Using Jumpnode, Hartfiel
can maintain and monitor the VoIP system themselves. Now
that's taking control of the situation!
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