Why CSI’s Paladin Sentinel Monitoring is simply better monitoring than other alternatives

May 26th, 2016
Why CSI’s Paladin Sentinel Monitoring is simply better monitoring than other alternatives

There are many options for monitoring hardware and software for your network.  Some are quite expensive and complex.  Some are very simplistic.  Some are free.  From the myriad of options out there here's why I believe CSI's Paladin Sentinel Monitoring is simply the best monitoring choice for your school, our public sector environment::

  • Automation.  So much of monitoring is automation.   The device is down.  You get notified.   This is the basic monitoring alert that most offerings provide including Paladin Sentinel.  This is the bread and butter of any monitoring solution.  However, here's why Paladin Sentinel is better at automation than most other offerings:
    • In most cases we can customize our automated responses.
    • We can notify via web console, email and SMS text alerts.
    • We can customize who gets what and how they get it.
    • We can do multi-tiered vendors support so that we can notify - for instance the HVAC vendor and your staff at the same time.
  • Flexibility and Customization.  Many alerting systems just do whatever they do out of the box.  Some are strong in Windows alerting but weak, or non-existent with other forms of alerting  Some cannot be customized, and adapted to unique alerting requirements.  Paladin Sentinel provides:
    • A wide variety of alerting mechanisms including:
      • WMI for Windows alerts
      • SNMP
      • SNMP Traps
      • SYSLOG
      • ICMP Ping
      • VMware alerting
      • Email alerting
      • Permanent and short-term suppression of alerts (i.e. we know the UPS is broken and we will fix it tomorrow so don't alert anymore today about this issue).
    • From those alert streams we can customize and tweak relevant alerts to make sure we are getting as much as possible in the automated alert stream to give you excellent visibility into the problem spots or pending issues in your network environment.
  • Multi-tiered approach.   We have found that one monitoring tool cannot provide the depth and breadth of alerting to do a good job in all areas  Therefore, with Paladin Sentinel we break our monitoring strategy down into specific categories so we can provide the most complete monitoring of each area of your network environment.  These include:
    • Windows
    • UPSes, SANs, etc
    • Network switches, firewalls and access points.
    • VMware virtualization
  • We deal with the complexity.  Many have tried the home grown approach to monitoring.  The reality is that these initiatives often fail or are severely limited in scope.  There are a couple of reasons for this:
    • Limited time in-house to implement
    • Limited budget for hardware and software to implement
    • Limited visibility into the network base upon complexity or lack of internal knowledge as to what is important.
  • Superior Expertise.  CSI has 37 years experience in all aspects of networks just like yours.  We know what is important.  We look at thousands of devices every day.   Monitoring your network is not an after thought.   We are constantly looking at ways to improve what we can see to keep you better informed so you can be more informed when issues arise, better direct your resources to solve real problems, and provide a better overall end-user experience.
  • We supplement our automation with real humans!   Most alerting just sends alerts. Hopefully you know what to do with the alert and whether it is important or not.  But how do you know what you don't know?  Are there some patterns or history of certain events going on that make us more concerned?  Do we see something profoundly wrong, or something really bad about to happen?   While we certainly rely on automated alerts like everyone else, CSI goes well beyond that by providing expert commentary and guidance as to what we think is important and what  you need to pay attention to.  In the office we work very hard to sift through the alert streams and figure out "is this a thing?" Then we reach out to you to try to make sure you know what you didn't know.   Our clients can tell you stories about the number of times we have reached out to them on nights and weekends and holidays when it was really obvious that something really bad was going on that simply couldn't wait for "normal business hours".

"Up-time" and stable network environments are vital to you providing an excellent end-user experience.  Monitoring of your network environment is not really optional anymore.  If something bad happens, you want to be the one picking up the phone and informing your users vs. being told you have a problem.  If something bad is about to happen, then we'd just assume help you avoid the issue, vs. consuming the resources, costs and potential downtime of cleaning it up after the fact.

But you can't see everything and know everything at all times.  That is where CSI's multi-decade expertise and combination of automated and live monitoring is far and above superior to other monitoring offerings.   CSI can help you answer the question, "how do I know what I don't know?"   One of our clients whom I called directly with a major problem expressed his appreciation that "CSI always knows more about my network than I do" and that we always provided him with actionable information in a timely manner.

CSI would like to help you eliminate the blind spots in your network.  Let us put Paladin Sentinel Monitoring to work for you.   Free trials are available.

Contact us for more details.

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