Current Filter: Network>>>>>Case Study>

   

Jameson Bank occupies a unique niche in the Canadian financial services industry. Specialising in foreign exchange and payment services, the Toronto-based bank serves small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that, due to their multinational commercial activities are exposed to unexpected changes in currency exchange rates. Jameson mitigates this exposure through a range of risk management and hedging programs, along with its range of worldwide exchange services.

Because of the important role Jameson Bank undertakes for its clients, transferring funds to over 200 countries and in 120 currencies, the bank's IT networks are at the centre of its operations. As part of a recent project to move its data centre and upgrade its legacy systems, Jameson planned a powerful new Network Operations Centre (NOC) to manage its internal/external infrastructures and troubleshoot issues quickly as and when they occurred.

According to Jay Fischbach, Vice President of Operations and Technology for Jameson, the specifications for the new monitoring software at the heart of the new NOC exceeded the power of its existing product adding, "At the time we could only monitor individual applications and we needed a more extensive solution to monitor our servers, networks, VMware ESX platforms and such."

IT Systems Analyst Daniel Sadavoy evaluated Paessler's PRTG Network Monitor and concluded that it had the required capabilities. The monitoring solution for LANs, WANs, servers, websites and applications is designed to help IT professionals identify potential outages before they occur, as well as remove system bottlenecks and optimise system resources. The Jameson team installed PRTG on a Windows 2008, 64-bit virtual machine supported by 2 CPUs and 4GB of memory. Because the bank's system is extensive, spanning routers, firewalls, servers, VMware ESXs and various applications, PRTG Network Monitor was expected to do a lot of heavy lifting. "We monitor our LAN, all internal switches, all of our edge routers and firewalls and any other vendor firewall or router in the middle that we can ping," said Fischbach. "Our Sonicwall and FortiNet data lines are covered as well."

To track the health of Web servers in the DMZ, Jameson deployed five remote probes along with a host of sensors that allowed it to split the monitoring load. The installation team also built several custom components. "We created a Citrix XenApp server sensor, a couple of multi-channel sensors to compare results and raise alerts when necessary and a hardware sensor that sends XML to PRTG to monitor temperature and humidity in our server room," Sadavoy explains. "All this was fed into our custom-built NOC dashboard," adding that the bank also integrated its previous monitoring solution into the PRTG GUI.

With the NOC operational, Fischbach and Sadavoy agree that the monitoring solution has added a new level of strength and resilience to Jameson Bank's IT infrastructure. Fischbach notes that the new monitoring platform uncovers outages quickly, even in vendor equipment. "We usually find issues before everyone else, and report it to them before they get it on their end. PRTG helps us solve bottlenecks and optimise our whole IT system." Sadavoy adds, "We use PRTG not only for monitoring purposes, but also for training our IT staff. A simple look at the four monitors in our NOC uncovers the root cause of the problem."

According to Fischbach, the new monitoring platform has reduced the bank's IT administrative time in 2013 by 25% as a direct result of the firm's ability to actively monitor and manage its applications and vendor equipment through its NOC. "We're impressed by the new versions features, icons and sensors. Paessler continues to develop for PRTG and it will be exciting to see where our platform goes next."