FedEx provides customers and businesses worldwide with the broadest portfolio
of transportation, e-commerce and business services. With annual revenues of
$25 Billion, the company offers integrated business applications through
operating companies competing collectively and managed collaboratively, under
the respected FedEx brand. The Fedex network services over 220 countries and
territories.
The groundbreaking technology and applications from FedEx lead the industry and
offer wireless and custom-automation solutions that are designed to seamlessly
integrate FedEx applications into customers' existing internal applications and
online systems.
Of course all of this technology requires a massive computer network that includes
over 100,000 network connections. With a network this big, the Network Management
teams are always looking for software tools that can improve the process of data
collection.
Statseeker was a tool of choice to collect data on the performance of more
than 154,000 interfaces, across more than 3000 sites, from a single server.
Statseeker's Network Monitor uses minimal bandwidth to collect 1.2 million
performance updates (OIDs) every minute from a single server. Historical
data is stored in 5 minute averages, allowing for accurate long term reporting
and is accessed for any part of the network, within seconds. Statseeker's real
time reporting is updated every 30 seconds, identifying network trouble spots.
Statseeker's auto-populate allowed the installation of 4715 devices (covering
more than 133,000 interfaces) in a single day. Additional time was required
for custom configuration of specific interfaces. Statseeker's Network Monitor
provides a valuable insight into the network performance both now and
historically and is constantly utilized by FedEx engineers.
Texas A&M University opened in 1876 as the first public institution of
higher learning in the state. Today, 170 degrees are offered to the
student body. The more than 46,000 enrolled students are supported by
16,000 faculty and staff. As a land, sea and space-grant institution,
Texas A&M conducts research in a broad range of fields with annual
research expenditures of almost $500 million. The campus, at 5,200
acres, is one of the largest in the United States and is home to the
George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
To support the extensive campus and user community, Texas A&M has a
substantial enterprise network, but unlike most large universities,
Texas A&M has a centralized network group that provides installations,
systems/security, troubleshooting, and engineering services for almost
the entire network. The campus network spans to more than 340
buildings representing 10+ million square-feet of classroom, lab, and
office space. The network edge consists of 2750 (mostly 10/100)
current and previous generation Cisco switches, 350 older Alcatel
switches, and fewer than 100 antiquated 3Com 10Mbps hubs. The outer
core of the network is composed of 80 current Cisco DSBU
router/switches. The primary core network is 15 Cisco 6500 routers
deployed in a partial mesh via 1Gbps (soon to be 10Gbps) connections.
Over the years, I have used many of the no-cost tools to monitor the
performance of the network. Most did, what I thought, an adequate job,
but the same deficiencies kept cropping up across the various
products. For example, as more devices were added to the monitoring
system the hardware requirements escalated at a much faster rate than
the number of devices being added. Additionally we consistently
exceeded the threshold to gather all the data from the network devices
in the collection period, which caused holes in the data. Also, the
monitoring tools were not flexible to changes; either a global change
such as the SNMP community string or a singular change such as a new
module being added to a router chassis. Routine and frequent changes
like this were cumbersome to complete. Nevertheless, I thought that
what I had was good enough; however, my opinion was unenlightened.
In less than a week into Statseeker's Free 30-day trial, I realized
that the previous tools were not adequate at all and that I was
missing a lot. Statseeker exposed me to true historical
reporting. After having used other tools for years that averaged and
.rolled up. data, it was an eye-opening experience to see historical
reports at such a granular level. In addition, Statseeker has
outstanding filtering capabilities. It can filter on just about
anything (devices, interface types, port speeds, user-defined
associations, etc.). In addition to the filters, different types of
data (frames, bytes, utilization, errors, availability, etc.) can be
selected to include in the report. I have been using Statseeker to
collect data from the campus network for over a year and a half. It
is currently monitoring almost 80,000 ports across over 3,000
devices. Statseeker was very easy to set up and the on-going
maintenance has been accomplished with minimal scripting effort. I
have been able to keep up with our frequent changes easily, but
Statseeker handles the most critical of these changes automatically. I
very much appreciate the minimal time required to maintain the
software and configuration. This allows me to spend more time looking
at the results of the data it collected. This is how network
performance monitoring should be.
I will be happy to discuss my usage and implementation in
detail. Contact me at matthew@tamu.edu
Matthew Almand
Chief Network Engineer
Networking & Information Security
Texas A&M University
The College of Saint Benedict (CSB) for women and Saint John's University (SJU) for men are ranked as two of the
top three Catholic colleges in the nation. Each college retains its own campus, residence halls, athletic programs
and traditions. They share one academic program and the combined enrollments of 3,914 students attend classes
together on both campuses.
The colleges also share one computer network. The CSB/SJU data network currently consists of 2,700 student-owned
PCs, 2,250 faculty/staff PCs, 750 public access PCs, and 100 servers connected to 321 switches and routers.
Before CSB/SJU found Statseeker the monitoring of network performance was somewhat pitiful. Forecasting usage
trends was at best a half educated wild guess and usage reports consisted mainly of port counter data. Critical event
notifications were initiated by our patrons by means of a call to the help desk. Problem tracking and resolution involved
logging on to the edge switches nearest to the location of the caller, checking the logs, and then logging on to the
interconnecting switches, checking their logs, and so on.
CSB/SJU found Statseeker in early December of 2003. We tried their free evaluation and purchased it the following
week. Statseeker currently monitors 360 devices and 11,418 ports on the CSB/SJU network.
Statseeker reports have helped us solve many of the intermittent yet persistent problems that occasionally plague networks.
Recently, Statseeker indicated that one of CSB/SJU's Internet firewalls was experiencing abnormally high network delay
times from the campus network. The delay was only experienced intermittently during business hours. By correlating
Statseeker's historical data and the real-time reports with other logging information we quickly tracked down the culprit
and solved the problem.
The CSB/SJU network group's favorite Statseeker feature is that we can do an on-demand check of the down status and
communication latency of all 360 monitored devices. We can also see the top 50 port errors for each of the network's
11,418 ports. This task can be accomplished with only three mouse clicks from anywhere we have access to a network
browser. If the resulting totals show any anomalies we can "drill down" to gather further information and take corrective
action usually before our patrons notice that there is a problem. These capabilities along with other features like threshold
exceeds reports and event notifications has enabled CSB/SJU's network group to become more proactive with our patron
support services.
The College of Humanities at The Ohio State University is dedicated to providing both undergraduate and graduate
students a quality educational experience. Supporting this mission is a team of IT professionals focused on
providing best of breed IT networks and services.
With almost 2,000 network interfaces across a variety of Cisco equipment, Statseeker is the monitoring tool of
choice. Statseeker's ability to collect data on every interface, every minute makes the task of identifying end
user and edge switch port issues relatively simple.
"Statseeker paid off for us again. We were having network timeouts and slowness, and the Statseeker web GUI let
us quickly find the problem....
Thanks again for the great product."
Widener University is a technology leader within the mid-Atlantic region of
the United States. In addition to providing a network infrastructure to the
Widener University community, it also serves as an internet service provider
for the regional public school system, and several businesses within the
local community. In addition to ISP services, Widener University holds
contracts with many of the surrounding schools to maintain and upgrade their
network infrastructure when necessary. All told, the Technical Resources
group of Widener University's Information Technology Services maintains the
connectivity needs of approximately 100,000 users.
Widener uses Statseeker to currently monitor about 200 critical devices, but
is currently in the process of expanding this number to include the rest of
Widener's edge devices as well as the infrastructure of the schools that we
maintain through contract agreements. Once fully utilized, Widener expects
to monitor approximately 3,000 devices and 40,000 ports across Widener
University's four campuses and the local public school system. Nortel
Networks routers and switches account for greater than 90 percent of the
monitored devices, but Statseeker is used to monitor Cisco routers, Microsoft
Windows servers, and several other vendors' hardware as well.
Although Widener University has only been using Statseeker for about 5 months,
it is quickly becoming the status and reporting tool of choice among the
several legacy network management and monitoring tools currently in place.
The ability to intuitively add, change and delete devices quickly and
dynamically made the implementation of this product a straightforward task.
The only issue that arose was when multiple NICs were used on different
networks, but the problem was quickly resolved by the Statseeker Technical
Support Team.
Within a two day period, Statseeker was up and monitoring 150 devices and over
3,000 ports with accurate device and port descriptions and with neighbor
relationships established. Recently, as students started to arrive on campus
with computers infected with various viruses and spy ware software, Statseeker
proved indispensable in locating problem systems. Statseeker was able to
display in real-time those systems causing network issues much more
affectively than using protocol analyzers and device management tools as had
been done in the past.
Although not quantified, the man hours saved by the Technical Resources group
compared with past experiences was easily felt. Although Widener University
has only been using Statseeker for five months, the value of the product has
been made apparent first hand on numerous occasions.
In the near future, Widener University expects to expand its use of Statseeker
by generating reports for trend analysis to better determine what areas need
additional bandwidth or support. Although not required, Widener also expects
to be able to generate reports to provide customers with statistics on network
performance, availability and usage in order to provide SLA type information
to those interested.
While Widener is currently using a different product to do critical event
notification, this functionality is expected to be moved to the Statseeker
server as well.
We have used Statseeker for almost two years and have found it as an
invaluable tool for troubleshooting our enterprise network. We can
go to one console to monitor all our servers, routers, switches, and firewalls
for availability, utilization, and errors. The web interface is intuitive
and very fast. The server is stable with no maintenance necessary.
Technical support has been quick and responsive when necessary which
wasn't often. We've had a very positive experience with this product.
Optus is an Australian leader in integrated communications - serving more than
five million customers each day. The company provides a broad range of communications
services including mobile, national and long distance services, local telephony,
international telephony, business network services, Internet and satellite services
and pay television.
In 2001, SingTel became the parent company of Optus, paving the way for Optus to
become a strong and strategic telecommunications player within the Asia-Pacific region.
Optus have over 2000 devices on their internal, corporate network. Their total port
count currently exceeds 60000 and they are proactively baselining and monitoring in
excess of 38000 network ports from a central point with Statseeker. Their Statseeker
server is a mere PIII 450 desktop, which easily handles this load.
"Statseeker has proven the concept of blanket monitoring in large scale networks -
it is possible to monitor over 38000 network nodes in real time."
The internal Optus network infrastructure team uses Statseeker mainly for capacity
planning of the Optus Enterprise Network. Statseeker was chosen because it gave them
an instantaneous presence across of a vast portion of the network. Statseeker
continuously collects bandwidth and health statistics for most of their switch and
router ports and the graphs are used to analyze traffic trends, calculate impact
possibilities and project network growth over time. The comprehensive baseline that
is generated by Statseeker forms a foundation for their calculations. Once a hot spot
has been identified, Statseeker forms part of the proof of concept documentation,
which later becomes a request for budget and, when approved, a full hardware or
link upgrade project.
Statseeker is hence a proactive monitoring tool used for forward planning, provision
of network impact assessments and justification of budget expenditure in given areas.
All members of the Capacity Planning team use Statseeker on a daily basis and claim
that it is currently the only affordable tool on the market to do blanket network
monitoring.
Optus has also deployed 15 LAN Analyzer probes across their network. These protocol
monitoring probes are permanently located at key Optus sites and are used for
protocol impact analysis. When a project team is about to deploy a new application or
make adds, moves or changes, they call in the network team to provide application
level monitoring on the relevant links. Once the change has been made, the project
team is able to assess the impact that the change has had on the network infrastructure.
The LAN Analyzer probes also provide each business unit with a breakdown of their
application usage. Traffic flows, to and from, any given host is recorded in real time
and can be accessed historically.
Optus was also pleased to have input into the future functionality of Statseeker.
Shortly after the application was deployed, a specific hardware report, detailing
percentages of port usage per device, was added at the suggestion of Optus. This
report has given Optus and other clients a remote control hardware audit tool and
has saved Optus considerable time and effort by giving instant centralized feedback
on port usage without the need for physical hardware audits.
Optus uses a variety of tools to monitor their network infrastructure. Their tool
kit includes Concord NetHealth, HP OpenView, Cisco Works and other Cisco software
tools. Statseeker forms the basis of their tool kit and is the only tool to provide
total network visibility.
Toyota in Australia has come a long way in the past decade. From a loose-knit group
of manufacturing, importing, distribution and sales operations in the 1980s, today's
Toyota Australia is a united and powerful force in the nations' automotive industry.
With over three decades of local car production behind them, they are now developing
a new role - competing in the global market. Following the commissioning of their
$420 million, state-of-the-art car plant at Altona, Melbourne, in 1995, they are
emerging as one of Toyota Japan's global manufacturing and export centers.
The centralised IT team at Toyota supports 2000 PCs nationally. They have 8 major
sites and also support dealer dial-in access to their network. Their desktop
infrastructure is fully outsourced, whilst their network is partially outsourced to
two independent service providers. One is responsible for their voice over IP
infrastructure and the other is responsible for the rest of the WAN including
24-hour monitoring of Toyota's IT network.
"Your support is really great. I can email or ring at any time. I love the support
I'm getting from Statseeker."
Toyota's investment in Statseeker originated from the need for a tool, which would
give them instant access to what is happening anywhere on their network. In choosing
Statseeker, Toyota was also able to validate the performance of their outsource partners.
Statseeker alerts the network Technical Specialist at Toyota to any device outages
on the network. They can then compare the downtime statistics they are getting from
Statseeker with those they are getting from their service providers, hence being
able to effectively gauge the speed of response of the outsourcer's helpdesk.
All parties have access to the application and Toyota uses Statseeker's reports at
their monthly review meetings.
In house Technical Specialists at Toyota still handle many of the day-to-day issues
that occur on their network. Statseeker gives them instant browser access to real
time events and ensures that they know about an issue before a user does. The
historical data from the baseline helps the team position an event in terms of its
recurrence and allows them to delegate the fix to the responsible party.
They have been proactively monitoring and base lining over 3000 ports, which
represents 95% of their network infrastructure.
The team at Toyota have recently invested in 5 LAN Analyzer probe licenses, which
will be deployed at their key sites. These probes will provide them with detailed
traffic protocol information to be used for troubleshooting and impact analysis.
Their vision for the future is to extend their use of Statseeker into the area of
capacity planning and infrastructure design. They now have a comprehensive baseline
of their entire LAN and WAN and will be using the data to ensure that upgrade budgets
are allocated in the most effective way possible.
Comalco is a supplier of bauxite, alumina and primary aluminium to Australia,
New Zealand and export markets. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Rio Tinto
and provides about 22% of Australia's total production of bauxite, 8% of it
alumina and 24% of its primary aluminium. It is the world's eighth largest
aluminium company.
Comalco's network infrastructure spans across 5 sites. These include their head
office in Brisbane, mine sites in Weipa, Bell Bay and New Zealand and refinery
in Gladstone. There are 3500 users on the Comalco network and each site has a
locally based IT support team. They currently use Statseeker to monitor around
2000 network interfaces, including all router ports, WAN links and all device
ports within the core infrastructure. Statseeker LAN Analyzer probes have been
deployed at each remote site and serve to monitor traffic at application level.
Comalco chose Statseeker because of their need for a network monitoring tool with
minimal bandwidth overhead.
"You don't need specialist skills to use Statseeker. Our IT support staff can have
a lot more visibility and Statseeker takes the guesswork out of network
troubleshooting."
The Infrastructure Support team at Comalco use a number of the Real Time reporting
features of Statseeker.
The network delay statistics are most commonly referred to because these allow
the helpdesk to pinpoint exactly which links on the network are running slow
and the impact that this delay has had on the users.
The delays are quantified in numbers, rather than described in words, equipping
the network support staff with factual data.
The IT team at Comalco are also in the midst of rolling out a number of key
projects and are using Statseeker in their test environment. With a comprehensive
network baseline already at hand, Comalco staff can accurately view the utilisation
impact that a new application has on their existing links.
The test results serve for capacity planning purposes and ensure that Comalco's
infrastructure upgrades are adequate and best value for the organization. Statseeker
is also used to test that network devices, such as routers, are configured for
optimum performance. Comalco has a number of distributed file systems that
replicate and Statseeker acts as a verification tool to ensure that incorrectly
configured hardware is not causing the links to flood.
In future, Comalco wishes to extend their deployment of Statseeker to include
switches, hubs and servers at all their sites. In the short term they envisage
having device status alerting which they can delegate to respective team members.
Future Publishing was founded in the UK in 1985. Today the Future Network
publishes over 80 magazines worldwide and has extensive online activities.
Future also license 39 titles to publishing partners in a further 27 countries.
Future employs over 1,000 people in offices in the UK, US, France and Italy. The
company was floated on the London Stock Exchange in June 1999 (symbol FNET).
Future were looking for an easy to use, low cost solution to network and
server monitoring problems.
"In short, of the products we tested, we feel confident we have made the right
choice with Statseeker."
In Statseeker, Future found a product which not only monitors uptime of products,
but also gives accurate and easily digestible picture of data transmitted through
the network. This data can be calculated in terms of bytes as well as just packets
which makes interpretation of reports far easier. Reporting functionality for
trending purposes was also at the top of Future's requirements list and with
Statseeker they have found it much easier to predict where bottlenecks are likely
to appear before actually doing so.
Monash is a global university with eight campuses including one in Malaysia
and one in South Africa. It is an energetic and dynamic university committed
to leading the way in higher education and research.
The Monash name is known and respected throughout the world for innovation
and progressiveness; for engagement with the major ideas and issues of the day
and with the industries, professions and communities it serves; and for its
international focus and global presence. These defining themes permeate and
give direction to the activities of Monash at every level.
The centralised network support team look after the connectivity needs of over
20000 student and administration clients. They are currently using Statseeker to
proactively monitor and baseline network traffic on over 1200 devices, across
all campuses and remote research facilities. Statseeker, which was implemented
by the Network Infrastructure Services group at Monash, monitors roughly 100
Marconi ATM switches, 400 Enterasys Smartswitches, 10 Cisco routers, 200 servers
and 600 hubs. Their total number of monitored network ports exceeds 37000.
Prior to investing in Statseeker, Monash University had a variety of different
monitoring and management tools on their network. Since implementing Statseeker,
that number has been reduced and now they predominately use a combination of
Statseeker, Webnet, Spectrum and BMC patrol. Their network administrator claims
that each product complements the other; with one of the key strengths of
Statseeker being it's ease of integration into the existing tools. Statseeker was
chosen because it was easy to use and exceptionally quick to roll out. They
claimed that in just 2 days 400 devices had been configured and they were
getting better graphs out of Statseeker than after months of configuring other
products.
"Statseeker does 80% of what you want very well, instead of trying to do 100%
very badly."
Monash University has been a Statseeker client for one year and they use the
product for 3 core purposes. Firstly, the application is used daily for
utilisation graphing. The product allows them to see traffic statistics on
any port of any device anywhere on their global network. This gives them total
visibility of link utilisation and a comprehensive baseline of their network
health. Secondly, the application is used for alerting. When a device goes
down Statseeker immediately alerts the support operators, who use the application
for network troubleshooting. Thirdly, Statseeker is used as a proactive tool,
especially for reducing errors.
In future, the network team at Monash University aim to broaden their use
of Statseeker to include service level (SLA) reporting. Their main goal will
still be to use Statseeker to help provide a reliable and efficient network.
Second to this, they hope to provide reliability feedback to their other vendor
partners. They look forward to future releases of Statseeker to include proactive
generation of high level management reports, user definition of what health
statistics are collected, alerting on interface utilisation threshold exceeds
etc.
"The Department has been using Statseeker for close to two years and now has
a detailed record of what has occurred on the network over that period. This
puts the Department in a position where it can base decisions concerning the
network on actual data. Any investigations, research or planning can rely on
real data and draw precise and reliable conclusions. The Department was
looking for a product that would take the guesswork out of network planning
and also provide:
- Real time monitoring of LAN and WAN devices and links
- Detection of possible problems and activation of alarms
- Comprehensive Service Level Agreement reports based on precise measurements
- A central, easily accessible repository for documents, diagrams, maps and photographs
- Traffic analysis down to source and destination addresses
- Assistance in problem resolution
Statseeker met all of the requirements with the added bonus of a simple
user-friendly browser interface. Management, support staff and selected
clients are granted access to the data through a password system and all
appreciate the ease at which they can access information and the quality
of its presentation. Statseeker have an active development program so that
enhancements and new features are implemented quickly and efficiently.
Statseeker has been invaluable when planning the upgrade or installation of
applications. For example the planning for the network wide installation of
SAP indicated that to ensure success it would be good insurance to upgrade
many WAN links. Statseeker was used to show that there was spare capacity
on these links and it was decided to run a pilot installation and obtain
an accurate measurement of traffic changes. Statseeker was used to prove
that bandwidth increases were not necessary and the monitoring since the
complete roll out of SAP justifies this decision.
Problem resolution has improved with Statseeker. When a client reports that
'network performance' is slow and after questioning reveals that this has
been happening for weeks Statseeker can be used to analyze traffic before
and after the problem started. Performance degradation can be detected,
particularly through the error records, before clients notice a problem
and a solution implemented. This has led to an improvement in both network
availability and reliability.
Statseeker is a valuable and mature product that has justified its purchase
through providing improved planning, problem resolution, and network analyses
from both real time and historical perspectives. It is not only a valuable
tool for network staff but has improved the understanding of both management
and clients.
I am available on +61 7 3224 8491 to provide any further information if
required".
Joe Thompson
Network Manager
