The Challenge

The Clovis Municipal School computer network spans 22 sites with approximately 4,000 nodes: Apple computers, routers, HP and Cisco switches. Challenged to ensure the network’s connectivity, the Clovis Municipal Schools’ IT team needed a program to monitor all switches and routers.

The AdRem Solution

Erica Williams, Technology Specialist-NOC, recalls, “We used to have a monitoring program before, but it lacked some of the features that we needed. It only provided a list of IP addresses with a button indicating the node status: up or down. When an alarm sounded we would go through the list to find which node was causing problems, ping it to check if it was actually down, and get the building maps out to see where that device is located. There was no visualization.”

Clovis Municipal Schools’ IT Team chose NetCrunch for its visual presentation of the network. “Before deploying NetCrunch, we had all network maps on paper. When something went down, we would pull notebooks out and have to back track until we found out what the problem might be. Now, I know exactly where the problem is. I can direct a technician to that spot without having to second-guess where we may, or may not have a problem,” explains Erica Williams.

The CMS IT Team scanned the maps of all school buildings housing their computer network and imported them to NetCrunch. Network nodes representing the equipment were then laid out on the maps. “Now any new technician, who may not be familiar with all of our school buildings, can remote in through the web, pull up the school map and locate that piece of equipment that’s giving us trouble,” she concludes,"NetCrunch saves us a lot of time."