Published by Patrick Gebhardt
Last updated on November 28, 2024
•
11 minute read
Besides the goal of providing our users with reliable uptime and a full overview of their IT, OT and IoT systems, we at Paessler have made it our mission to reduce resource consumption together with our customers. Certain companies have already shown through great use cases not only in how they use PRTG to monitor their sometimes very complex systems, but also how they manage to fulfill this particular purpose and reduce their resource consumption.
Here is the fourth use case of this series. Enjoy!
ENGIE Solutions, a major French company that provides energy efficiency services to companies and communities, chose to move its monitoring system from PRTG Network Monitor, which it had been using for many years, to PRTG Enterprise Monitor, which is designed to meet the needs of large infrastructures. With over 25,000 monitoring sensors, including over 13,000 for its IoT equipment (and still more to come), the company required uninterrupted access to a reliable, unified view of its various business services via multi-server dashboards. Guillaume Baudry, Network Architect in the Center of Excellence for Systems and Networks at ENGIE Solutions, talks about the transition process and the assistance provided by Paessler.
“The challenge for large organizations is to successfully
monitor tens of thousands of elements in real time, and ensure that they are performing well, without drowning in a flood of information. Paessler PRTG solves the problem by providing that essential consistency, especially since PRTG “oversees” other monitoring solutions in an overall merging of dashboards that organizes all the information, from the global level to the most granular. It's a real help in our ongoing quest for simplification.”
ENGIE Solutions’ requirements: to be able to continue deploying additional sensors for monitoring
Since 2010, ENGIE Solutions has used PRTG Network Monitor to monitor its entire IT infrastructure. By 2016, around 14,000 sensors had been deployed, both in the two data centers and in the company’s 900 agencies and operating facilities. The goal was to be able to monitor multiple servers, on-site and in the cloud, as well as storage units, printers and over 200 internal and external applications.
But that was only the beginning. In 2018 the company added significant quantities of IoT equipment throughout France and beyond, both in remote locations and directly on customers’ premises. 6,000–8,000 additional sensors were installed on meters, thermostats, connected heating systems, wind turbines, etc.
Datacenters interconnection
IoT and office automation monitoring
According to Baudry, “There was a realization at the time that monitoring our IoT equipment was vital to our performance and predictive maintenance, and that PRTG was fully capable of doing that for us. By September 2020, we had already installed a total of 25,000 sensors, and expected to deploy 15,000 more sensors for IoT. We urgently needed to upgrade our system, which was reaching maximum capacity.”
For ENGIE Solutions, the goal was simple: to continue deploying as many monitoring sensors as needed to ensure service availability and continue improving quality by meeting their service-level agreements (SLAs). “We also needed to maintain ease of use and fast visibility of our entire infrastructure via the nine giant screens in our dedicated IT room at headquarters,” Baudry adds.
Using PRTG: monitoring a large infrastructure and highly advanced utilization of the tool
The IT department had been brainstorming ways to reach this goal when the solution presented itself: the launch of PRTG Enterprise Monitor, a monitoring tool for largescale IT environments with tens of thousands of sensors and a flexible, membershipbased license model.
Baudry’s initial assessment: “The challenge for large organizations is to successfully monitor tens of thousands of elements in real time, and ensure that they are performing well, without drowning in a flood of information. Paessler PRTG solves the problem by providing that essential consistency, especially since PRTG “oversees” other monitoring solutions in an overall merging of dashboards that organizes all the information, from the global level to the most granular. It’s a real help in our ongoing quest for simplification.”
These first months of testing have been decisive for the company. It will be able to continue using PRTG towards modeling and monitoring its SLAs, both for traditional IT and for the IoT, such as monitoring energy distribution for its customers. With 63 people using PRTG daily over the course of many years, ENGIE Solutions is definitely one of the companies that takes full advantage of the tool’s many features.
Baudry explains, “We have so many varied, unusual elements to monitor that we
end up developing our own sensors. It can be done very quickly and easily using the
PRTG API and REST APIs in our CI/CD pipelines, and even the MIBs, which the system
manages efficiently. It also effectively handles SQL and quick, intuitive filtering on
Elasticsearch, allowing us to query all the Ping sensors at once. Paessler’s customer
support has been very valuable, and just perfect when we need them for technical
questions.”
The IT team’s goal of simplifying processes and limiting human intervention whenever
possible has been helped by automating several functions using scripts in PRTG.
For example: the automatic deployment of sensors on a new virtual machine that a
customer requested on the company’s marketplace, or sending a personalized alert
to a third-party service provider in case of an anomaly on a monitored device.
ENGIE Solutions dashboards
The benefits of PRTG: complete, scalable monitoring with proven ROI
The decision to move to the new Enterprise Monitor version of PRTG was an easy
one for ENGIE Solutions’ Center of Excellence for Systems and Networks, thanks to
years of positive experience using PRTG Network Monitor. The team has discovered
multiple advantages to using PRTG, first and foremost being the dashboards.
These have helped the team improve transmission of monitoring information to its
colleagues, partners and customers throughout France, using the report creation
features to provide more visibility on its actions and the work accomplished.
Baudry adds, “The management of our SLAs was very convincing, and made us
reconsider our approach to monitoring by focusing more on performance. It’s helped
us improve the quality of our service, particularly in terms of our customer-facing
online platform, ENGIE Direct. Having the option of automating tasks with PRTG has
quickly become indispensable, and we plan to go even further in that direction. But it’s
just as important to be able to reliably monitor our vast array of IoT equipment, as well
as the data it provides, which our tools collect and utilize automatically.”
Now more than ever, the future of monitoring for ENGIE Solutions is in the IoT. The
company is about to deploy 15,000 new sensors. PRTG Enterprise Monitor has helped
achieve this. But the company doesn’t plan to stop there. It also has an enormous industrial perimeter that hasn’t yet been added to its PRTG centralized monitoring, which can combine companies’ IT and OT data.
😍 Do you have a story to tell...?
... of how you and your company manage to save resources with PRTG? This makes our hearts beat faster. Please contact us and tell us everything! Simply click the banner below or use: resource.reduction@paessler.com
Also interesting:
👉 Everything you need to know about our company purpose
👉 PRTG supports intelligent manufacturing at Bosch Rexroth
👉 Aquafin keeps infrastructure clean with PRTG
👉 Kennedy Industries helps keep communities safe and operational with PRTG
You there!
