Mar
16
Written by:
Sean Wilson
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 1:36 PM
Most businesses these days realise that in the current climate you cannot afford to let any opportunity slip – many business are now investing heavily in business intelligence BI to keep them appraised of the performance of the business. However sometimes novel solutions present themselves from existing resources that can have a tremendous positive impact with minimal investment. Here I am going to show how a techie tool for monitoring systems and alerting the Systems Administrator to potential issues may be used to improve performance in other areas of the business...
PRTG Network Monitor is an extremely flexible monitoring tool – see my post here for details – and has a range of features that make it a great tool for monitoring business systems and responding to trigger conditions to alert business owners to issues and opportunities. It can even produce smart graphs of the results so can display simple performance statistics over a period of time. Whilst PRTG cannot replace BI in terms of analysis – it can be a useful ally in taking care of the business.
There are essentially 2 stages to setting up an alert for a business condition:
1) Setting up an appropriate alerting mechanism - Email, SMS, ICQ and MSN messenger are all possible options.
2) Setting up a sensor to monitor a system and apply the alert when applicable.
PRTG can alert users in a number of ways, one of the first tasks is to set up the appropriate notifications (by clicking on the setup button and selecting notifications). A notification is simply a template that can be used by any senso
r to alert users to a particular condition. Here we are setting up an email to the sales team and providing a simple text template though HTML may be used to make the message more readable.
Now that we have created our notification we can use it in a sensor. In this case we will be monitoring card failures on the web site – in the event that a customer is having difficulties paying online with a credit card the Sales team will be alerted and someone will call the customer. This sensor will use PRTG’s SQL query capability to query the Web SQL server for failure records. If it finds one failure record it raises a warning – but after a second attempt it becomes an error (condition Down).
We apply our previously created notification to this sensor – if the sensor switches to condition Down, then an email will be sent to Sales.
OK – so this is the basics of getting PRTG working for the business by taking advantage of its features to monitor accessible systems. You may find that you want to tweak the messages to make them more understandable to the recipients but this is straightforward.
Some other things you might want to monitor depending on the availability of information: daily sales rates, call rates, unanswered requests, the list is endless...
PRTG is free for up to 10 sensors and is quick and easy to set up so if you have nothing else in place at present you have nothing to lose by trying it but you may just win more business...
For more information:
To find out more about Monitoring Software – click here.
To download PRTG Network Monitor – click here.
To buy PRTG Network Monitor – click here.
Or, just post your query, I’ll be watching….
Copyright ©2010 Sean Wilson