Paessler PRTG pays off for Australia’s Hume Bank
About Hume Bank
Hume Bank is a financial institution offering north-eastern Victoria and southern New South Wales a local banking alternative with national convenience. With approximately 150 staff, a network of 19 branches and 47 ATMs, Hume Bank prides itself on being highly customer focused. Unlike most financial institutions, it isn't owned by profit driven shareholders and instead all benefits of banking are returned to its customers.
At the core of the organisation's customer centricity is a fast and convenient service. With this in mind, Hume Bank sought to gain greater insight into the organization's IT networks to help maintain a highly available platform for the business and its customers, crucial for a financial organization built on trust.
Following recommendation by a third party supplier, Hume Bank selected to trial a free version of Paessler PRTG Network Monitor to gain insight into traffic availability for its branch network. On seeing what the solution could do and the benefits it could bring beyond simply monitoring network links, Hume Bank reviewed the cost and scope of features versus the competition including SolarWinds and Nagios and instantly selected PRTG.
“PRTG is a great product, which simply just works. Price and scope of features were the key drivers behind our choice of PRTG.”
Brad Mennen, Systems Administrator at Hume Bank
Making network monitoring easy
Used by over 500,000 system administrators worldwide, PRTG is a complete monitoring solution for LANs, WANs, servers, websites, applications, URLs and much more. The trusted product, capable of monitoring virtually any kind of device, application or service, helps IT professionals identify potential outages before they occur as well as remove system bottlenecks and maximise use of system resources.
"PRTG is very simple to deploy," commented Brad Mennen, Systems Administrator, Hume Bank. "We were even able to customise the software to suit our own business needs, for example we customised some of the reports we receive from PRTG and developed custom executables for sensors and the issuing of alerts via SMS message."
Hume Bank installed PRTG on a Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system within its virtual infrastructure, supported by 2 CPUs and 8GB of memory. Monitoring a whole host of servers, switches, routers, applications and even printers, ATMs and Eftpos, all aspects of network monitoring for the bank were covered using just under 900 sensors. "With PRTG we can even keep an eye on response times for loading web pages for the public facing internet banking site, via both desktop and mobile, so when a problem arises it can be dealt with swiftly and efficiently to reduce any impact to our customers," explained Brad.
Ensuring efficient operations
As each data center and all of Hume Bank's branches and ATM networks are covered by PRTG using both local and remote probes, the organisation can rest assured that monitoring of the bank's IT network is in safe hands. If an ATM goes down in Albury, the bank will be alerted immediately and the problem can be resolved quickly; similarly if there is an issue with Eftpos links in Sydney, the bank will be alerted to take action and any repercussions for its customers or the wider business can be kept to a minimum.
Conclusion
PRTG has given Hume Bank much greater insight into the availability of its systems, network and the availability of services it provides. As a result of having better insight, it has helped the organisation predict and resolve issues before they become much greater problems impacting viability to internal and external customers. As a result, the bank has made significant time and financial savings through reducing IT administrative time and cost of outages.
"PRTG provides us with an always-on second set of eyes that lets us know when something in our network isn't right. As a result of our viability of services being measured, it helps us better allocate time and resources to improving areas that may need attention. PRTG is a great product, which simply just works," continued Brad.
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