An upgrade to the tool would have given the financial services firm more visibility into its data center equipment; however, the enhancement came with a $3,000 price tag. After an initial rebuff, Interactive Data’s management team gave the thumbs up to the WhatsUpGold upgrade in the spring of 2011.
The new release included monitoring of power supplies and server temperature. The financial services company put SNMP agents on the servers to collect performance information. Armed with this data, Interactive Data was able to pinpoint the source of its problems.
At times, temperatures rose and caused the systems to overheat. Also, the electrical power was not evenly balanced, so the systems would trip from time to time, causing momentary outages. With the enhanced management tool, the business established new alert settings, so the IT department could respond to problems before they caused outages. As a result, the company improved its server availability.
Interactive Data would like to extend the use of WhatsUpGold in other ways, but cost once again is an inhibitor. "I would like to see more plug-ins available with the base package," says Cabrales. Ipswitch packages its product in a sliding scale model, where the more devices that are monitored, the more the management solution costs. Also, plug-in modules for features such as Cisco Systems' NetFlow and automatic failover come at an addition cost.
Long term, Interactive Data may find the funding for those additional functions, but, for now, the company is content with the visibility provided by WhatsUpGold. "We could not tolerate random outages and are glad that the upgrade fixed our problems," says Cabrales.
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