We tried 15 different monitoring suites, but nothing came close to NetCrunch. It's incredibly easy to configure and it takes us longer to install Windows than to get NetCrunch up and running.
Allen Hornung, IT Network & Security Administrator, Trinity High School
One of the biggest challenges in the networking world is forecasting. For example, how would you estimate the future bandwidth usage of more than 1,400 users at the same time, given the complexity of applications and protocols?
This is precisely what four full-time IT Administrators calculate every year, in order to provide Trinity High School with a reliable, steady internet and intranet connection, while keeping some room to account for possible usage spikes or changes.
However, even with a solid plan in place, everything can come to nearly a halt when one of the core devices begins to malfunction. Without constant bandwidth monitoring, checking on the configuration and status of every port on every switch, pin-pointing where the noise comes from is a very difficult task to accomplish. Moreover, the scale of network operations for an entire high school often demanded that the four administrators had to fix numerous problems at the same time. In sum, for the Trinity High School IT Team, time management became of crucial essence, as the network grew.
Overall, the network of Trinity High consists of over 2500 concurrent “Bring your Own Device” endpoints, numerous servers, and other back-end equipment. . In the back-end, everything is supported by 40Gbps Aruba and HP switches. “The key pain-point has always been bandwidth forecasting” - says Allen Hornung, the IT Network & Security Administrator at Trinity High.
The IT Office at Trinity High turned to network monitoring solutions in order to gain a better understanding of current bandwidth utilization and prepare future forecasts.
“We tried 15 different monitoring suites, but nothing came close to NetCrunch” - says Allen. “NetCrunch is incredibly easy to configure and it takes us longer to install Windows than to get NetCrunch up and running. Moreover, thanks to flow analysis, we no longer throw money on bandwidth. Instead, we have clear synopsis of where bottle-necks and other network congestion is occurring.”
Trinity High School is a Catholic, all-boys, college preparatory high school located in St. Matthews, Kentucky, a city within Louisville Metro. It is located in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville. The school incorporates the Catholic tradition of teaching and learning. The school campus comprises about 1,400 students.
