Firefighting with SNMPc
North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue serves the communities and people of North
Yorkshire in the North of England. The service receives approximately 19,000
emergency calls each year and responds to over 9,000 incidents. These include
incidents that involve fire as well as attending road traffic accidents, rail
disasters and others. Over 850 employees operate from 39 sites around the County.
The efficiency of the service is dependent on communication. IT communications
play an important part in this. All 39 sites are connected over a Wide Area Network,
which comprises of Cisco routers using a combination of fixed lines and ISDN.
Running IT within a 24hour service organisation presents many challenges. Kyle
Whittle, Development Support Technician explains why he first started to look at
network management.
“Our requirement covered a number of areas. Our key drivers included understanding
network issues during and outside of office hours through alerting, monitoring how
bandwidth is being utilised in order to reduce infrastructure costs and looking for
spikes in traffic to trace where it is coming from. We quickly found that SNMPc from
Castle Rock provided a solution in all of these areas and no other product could touch
it for price and functionality.”
First, Kyle downloaded and installed the free 30 day evaluation of SNMPc.
Installation is straight forward, with the product automatically discovering
and mapping the network, allowing the user to set up a structure for alerting.
Kyle defined a number of thresholds so that he and the rest of the IT team would
receive email or SMS messages when these were exceeded, an invaluable feature when IT
resources need to be accessible on a 24 hour basis. This alerting system not only
informs the staff when there are issues, such as errors on devices, but can also act
as an early warning system, letting the team know of issues before they become critical.
Reports were then set up to look at bandwidth utilisation on links, to gain visibility
of which were used most heavily. Profiling this data over a period of time is useful
for capacity planning and builds up a picture of utilisation, which helps to determine
whether the links have been sized correctly. Viewing SNMPc reports makes it easy to
make a judgement on whether specific links need upgrading or downgrading. This also
allows the service to make accurate predictions of current and future WAN costs.
North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue opted for UK partner Teneo’s after sales package of
training and installation. The system was fully configured to the service’s requirement
and key staff were trained on how to derive maximum usage from the system, utilizing all
features.
A number of benefits quickly became apparent, including reduction of costs, greater
reliability and availability of the network and the ability to plan for the future.
Configuration issues have been identified and corrected to enable informed decisions
on down or upgrading links.
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