Convenience stores are the fast way for folks on the road to run in, grab what they need and be off to the next stop in their busy days. But when a regional convenience store chain known for its speedy service found itself spending as much as 6 hours to recover from fairly frequent failures of DVR servers used to help secure its stores it simply created too much busy work.
For a couple of years, the chain's IT staff had responded to DVR server failures by pulling a technician away from whatever work was assigned for the day and having he or she drive to a store to reimage the machine. Each trip meant a half day or more wasted out of the office to perform less than 10 minutes of actual onsite work to reimage the machine and reboot. Adding insult to injury, the fully burdened cost per incident topped $2500. Meanwhile, an important security asset was offline for hours at a time.
That's when the chain's IT director called the Ipswitch network management division and asked if we could make his IT life a little more, well, convenient. He told us that one of the other solutions he looked at before calling would cost $75 per device. We countered with a less costly alternative, which included WhatsUp Gold. We told him that our network monitoring solution could accomplish the same result for a fraction of the cost.
They installed our product, and now when one of the DVRs goes down, WhatsUp Gold "sees" the problem immediately and instantly kicks off a script to tell the appliance to automatically re-image the DVR. The result? Productivity is up now that no one needs to drop everything and jump in a car for hours at a time. Savings are up too: it costs nearly $2500 less per incident to rectify.
How things got convenient
The IT team set up WhatsUp Gold and discovered the equipment in each store. They then created device groups for each location. This way whenever there was an equipment failure, the IT department knew immediately which store was having the problem.
They then set up performance monitors on the DVR systems to start capturing data so they could find the anomalies causing the failures.
They then created an Active Script Action that would preform the task of reimaging and rebooting the DVR systems. Once the script was written, it would be triggered whenever there was a failure.
All of this took only a week to get done. How convenient.
WhatsUp Guru (Jason Williams)
Manager, Community ManagementIpswitch, Inc
