CASE STUDY
Lippert added the importance of comprehensive monitoring for his role as Head of ICT and Digitalisation:“ With digitalisation, IT is increasingly becoming the basis for components and departments that were previously analogue. For us as an IT team, this means more and more responsibility. To best fulfil our role, we must always be informed of the status and performance of all IT and stadium technology, and be promptly notified in the event of disruptions – not only about the type, but also the cause and location. Such notifications are only possible if digitalised environments and IT are monitored with a single monitoring system, and if this system is able to maintain a comprehensive overview. This is exactly what we get with PRTG.”
IT Monitoring: The basis
A traditional IT environment composed of servers, databases, storage systems, firewalls, switches, backup systems, Wi-Fi access points, cloud services and many other IT components – all of which are integrated into the centralised PRTG monitoring environment – serves as the basis for Mainz05’ s stadium technology and everyday operational procedures.
Many of these components have been integrated into PRTG automatically via SNMP. For others, such as Fortigate firewalls or the Veeam backup system, Lippert and his team use PowerShell scripts to query data via the device application programming interface( API).
Mainz05 uses Büro + from Microtech as its ERP solution. Büro + generates an XML file that is read via a PowerShell script and integrated into PRTG. With this tool, the team can keep a constant eye on the number of users and the cash flow in the inventory management system.
But monitoring with PRTG doesn’ t stop there: servers, services, the internal databases of the ERP system and the use of licenses. If a service fails, PRTG restarts it automatically. As a result, many IT problems are resolved immediately – without Lippert and his team having to intervene.
The Mainz05 website is one of the club’ s most important communication tools for fans and the press. Lippert and his team use PRTG remote probes in various subnets to monitor load times from different perspectives and therefore optimise performance for all users.
PRTG remote probes are polling engines that use queries( sensors) to collect monitoring data via common protocols, before sending this data to the main PRTG instance( with TSL encryption) for evaluation. With remote probes, multiple locations can be monitored by a single instance of PRTG. Among other things, they can also be used( as in the current example) to monitor website load times from different perspectives.
Lippert said:“ Of course, a monitoring tool with a high degree of automation is extremely beneficial. On the other hand, this can also be extremely limiting as the creative solutions( which are always needed in practice) are often difficult to implement. PRTG offers the perfect compromise here: the software comes with numerous predefined sensors and features that function out of the box, which makes our day-to-day work much easier. In addition, its custom sensor templates and API allow us to easily integrate our own scripts to meet our own individual needs.” p
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