Case study - Inland Transportation Services

Inland Transportation Services (ITS) is a transportation demand management (TDM) consulting firm that required event-log management software to gain control, monitor and safeguard their internal/external infrastructure. They also needed the ability to save, archive and classify all events while creating an audit trail. To meet their extensive log management needs, ITS installed GFI EventsManager.

Challenges

ITS has been operating since 1989 and has extensive experience in the management, implementation and administration of regional rideshare programs. In order for the company to have complete control and a clear overview over their internal/external infrastructure they saw the immediate need for an even log management solution.

“Monitoring 15 servers across three separate domains along with Cisco ASA5510 firewalls is a lot to properly monitor,” said Bryan W. York, Regional Network Administrator of ITS. “We needed to have the ability to save, archive and classify all events including W3C3, Syslog, SNMP, Citrix and MS Exchange events while also creating an audit trail.”

Mr. York had previous experience using GFI EventsManager and GFI LANguard™, a vulnerability and patch management solution, in his previous company. Having first-hand experience of the benefits he realized that GFI EventsManager would be an ideal solution at ITS.

“I’ve had previous experience with GFI and I consider the products offered to carry the most bang for the buck especially in a Windows environment. There are several freeware and shareware products available, but they lack many of the features we require,” he said. “Pricing and familiarity with GFI was the bottom line in deciding to go with GFI. Other products were briefly viewed but were not considered due to the cost.”

Implementation

“Installation was easy and the initial scan of our networks helped for a quick start”, said Mr. York. “Having the ability to group and classify different types of equipment also helped. Best of all, policies can be applied to a group of equipment so it’s not necessary to repeatedly enter the same information. You also have the ability to take a group item and define it separately from the other items in the group which is useful when you are dealing with more than one domain.”

Speaking from a hardware perspective, Mr. York explained that “a desktop computer is in use at the GFI server and there has not been any noticeable impact on network/application performance.”

The networks were already set up by the time he joined the company; however, with the use of GFI EventsManager it helped him to “reconfigure our network and fine tune reoccurring errors which would have been difficult to see scrolling through event logs manually one by one. An extra bonus is that you can select to have the event logs cleared once GFI EventsManager imports them. GFI EventsManager itself also has a rotational based auto archive.”

GFI EventsManager also helped ITS Consulting from a compliance and legal perspective as Mr. York explained that their database servers contain information valuable to the company, therefore “it is very helpful to get notifications in certain predefined scenarios.”

Furthermore from a financial perspective, Mr. York said that funding for their organization is provided by the Regional Ridematching Consortium therefore choosing “a reasonably priced product that we need makes for an easier case to purchase.”

Benefits

The benefits of implementing GFI EventsManager were evident within a very short time span. “GFI EventsManager is a great tool to have in today’s IT world and has saved us a significant amount of time. People have to take on more responsibility while being expected to handle a larger workload at the same time.”

“There was a downward trend in the amount of errors being received. It took about three weeks to fix all the issues that I inherited when I took this position. Slowly the errors dropped down to reasonable levels of errors and network noise.”

Despite being a highly technical solution, GFI EventsManager provides very important and useful information for executives and managers. “The report pack is a great asset. Today’s typical CEO or President does not want a 300-page report like the good old green bar paper days. They want quick, visual data that is easy to analyze. After the purchase and investment, the reports we generated helped justify the face value of GFI EventsManager,” said Mr. York.

Target reached

“Since GFI EventsManager was installed in mid-September 2010, we have collected over 89,000,000 events which have been parsed, filtered, reported and archived while keeping the noise events out of view. I’m able to drill down to exactly what I want to see.”

Links

For more information about GFI EventsManager visit our product discovery page.

Download version of the software here

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