Paessler PRTG Enables All Of The Diocese Of Ballarat Catholic Education Schools With Fast, Reliable IT Infrastructures

About Diocese of Ballarat Catholic Education Limited

The Catholic Diocese of Ballarat is diverse and geographically extensive incorporating over 100,000 square kilometres in twenty-nine parishes covering the western third of Victoria, extending from the Murray River in the North to the Southern Ocean to the South.

Diocese of Ballarat Catholic Education Limited (Dobcel) is the governing body of a system of 57 schools (52 primary and 5 secondary) across the diocese, delivering a high-quality, faith-based, and affordable education option for over 13,000 students and their families and employing 2,300 teachers and support staff. It also supports six religious order owned secondary schools with a further 5,000 students.

Paessler PRTG helps Dobcel:

• To provide visibility and control over its network
• By providing early proactive detection of network issues
• To provide alerts to the right people in a timely manner
• To provide telemetry about network performance
• To be more proactive about potential issues
• To improve its capacity planning
• To reduce outages by improving network resilience
• To be up and running quickly in the event of an outage.

The Background

Over the past ten years, DOBCEL has completely revamped its technology infrastructure across its head office and schools, from keyboards and mice to firewall egress. However, the organisation had no centralised infrastructure management or monitoring before this transition. This meant that its IT personnel often had to travel to schools experiencing IT issues or outages or implement essential patches, which was both time-consuming and resource intensive.

“At this point, DOBCEL was using both SolarWinds and Spiceworks to monitor individual systems or school environments, but it was quite haphazard and didn't provide the IT team with good telemetry for decision-making purposes,” said Damian Foster, Manager of IT and Cyber Security at Diocese of Ballarat Catholic Education.

While its IT support team has expanded over the years, DOBCEL still operates with a small team of technology specialists within its central IT team, meaning those resources can sometimes be stretched. Some of these team members are based in schools and others are located at its Lake Wendouree headquarters in Ballarat.

The majority of the secondary schools owned by Religious Orders and have their own on-site IT teams, but because they operate within the diocese, DOBCEL works in concert with its IT specialists to provide centralised monitoring via Paessler PRTG, allowing them to provide advice and support when required.

The Challenges

The key challenge for the DOBCEL IT team is monitoring of the large surface area, and prior to implementing Paessler PRTG its internal systems had no centralised monitoring in place.

Outages, maintenance and patching

Though rare these days, DOBCEL’s IT team members do occasionally travel to schools across the region to perform essential IT maintenance or patching. Since Ballarat is a large geographical area stretching from the Murray River to the Ocean in the South of Victoria, this can involve return journeys of between ten to twelve hours.

Today, most essential maintenance and patching tasks are done remotely. DOBCEL’s IT team can proactively identify potential issues before they become bigger problems as they have visibility of the entire IT infrastructure through PRTG Network Monitor.

In addition, on the rare occasion of an outage, DOBCEL’s IT team has access to all the relevant data needed through the PRTG dashboard in relation to the anomaly that caused a particular issue, which allows outages to be resolved more quickly.

The importance of capacity planning

Capacity planning allows DOBCEL to identify trends and data on a daily basis, another key role that PRTG plays.

“When data transitions from a trickle to a flood, it quickly reveals the strengths and limitations of our IT infrastructure,” said Damian Foster.

“Availability and performance issues soon become evident when something isn't functioning, affecting the interconnected systems. The ability to see the network’s performance level, including how many devices are connected to an access point and what kind of flow through it is getting on its switching uplinks is extremely valuable to our IT support team,” Damian continued.

Dobcel’s IT support staff need to understand the flow, ingress and egress data rates, the firewall compliance requirements and then ring-fence its visibility of all the infrastructure in its environment, whether configured operationally or set to a particular standard network optimisation. PRTG enables the IT team to have this data at their fingertips and when there is an issue, the PRTG monitoring system alerts the team to enable them take preventative action as soon as required.

The Outcome

DOBCEL implemented Paessler PRTG a decade ago, and the organisation has seen incredible value in this centralised monitoring system, which provides 360-degree visibility of its entire IT infrastructure spread across the vast Ballarat region.

PRTG allows DOBCEL head of IT to have daily visibility of tangible factors on the centralised dashboard about the technology that runs DOBCEL, enabling them to understand more about the day-to-day flow and metrics, helping to make more informed decisions about either technical response or capacity and growth.

Resolving alert fatigue

After a period following PRTGs implementation, DOBCEL’s’s IT leadership decided to customise its dashboards to ensure it was only sending the support team urgent alerts about data that directly impacted the running of the core network. This would reduce the daily alerts the IT team received to prevent alert fatigue.

For many in the DOBCEL IT team, alert fatigue is either one of two things; they miss an alert or overreact to another because it is classified as a high alert. This system can assist staff to think more critically about how they can begin to unpack the words on a ticket and then fill in the gaps.

Monitoring for less critical on-premise systems was removed from PRTG. The team found that this enabled them to make better reactionary decisions regarding an outage, removing the complexity which could cause alert fatigue.

"PRTG gives us comprehensive visibility into the post-installation infrastructure of DOBCEL, which we monitor daily. This allows us to view the infrastructure as a dynamic, continuously evolving system" said Paul Jans, Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Director, Business Services at Diocese of Ballarat Catholic Education Limited.

PRTG identifies connectivity problems

A DOBCEL school had recently invested in new infrastructure. They experienced connectivity issues, with their network constantly reaching capacity. Through PRTG, they quickly got to the root cause and found the issue was the firewall not allowing traffic to ingress appropriately through the centralised hub back to its HQ.

The IT team was able to align their actions using PRTG purely as a reference to understand that the best course of action was to do a cache flush on the routes causing the issue, which resolved the problem and the ongoing connectivity issue, which PRTG confirmed via an alert sent to the head of IT.

“Where PRTG really shines is that it provides flexibility for DOBCEL’s IT team to work remotely when required, particularly for those times outside of normal working hours. This helps avoid burn out, but at the same time maintains the ability to resolve potential IT problems that would otherwise impact schools the next day,” said Paul Jans.

Remote management for patching

DOBCEL’s IT team uses a Remote Management tool to manage its patching and Windows updates across the organisation. PRTG sends notifications after ‘patch Tuesday’ to say that the systems are fully patched and that sometimes some bad patches have failed and need very specific problem resolution.

“PRTG has allowed DOBCEL to put a ring-fence around a previously sprawling and haphazardly designed IT environment while we design an infrastructure program that standardises our school environments. This enables us to design more robust systems that minimise loss of learning and teaching hours for students and staff because the technology works reliably. And in the event that it does fail, we can quickly identify and resolve the issue,” said Damian Foster.

Security risks

Given the rise of security risks today, the IT team can offer all schools proactive security protection without offering them ingress into the core network housed at HQ, which is inside the firewall and internal IT perimeter.

The Future

PRTG will increasingly allow the DOBCEL IT team to remain in touch with the systems they support at a distance and full-day trips from Ballarat to Swan Hill or Mildura will become more infrequent. In terms of the more efficient use of the team’s time, this will allow them to better focus on the strategic IT initiatives that will drive further performance and effectiveness of the system moving forward.

The ability to separate the monitoring for its HQ and schools and to provide them all with monitoring as-a-service is a key future strategy for DOBCEL, and PRTG will play a vital role in helping achieve that aim.

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