“The features that distinguish NetCrunch from other solutions are its agentless capabilities and the powerful, customizable dashboard with real- time network views.”
Amir Fishler
System engineering team leader
Cellcom LTD
Amir Fishler at server room
Amir Fishler leads a team of system engineers in the Value Added Services department in Cellcom’s technology division. One of his main goals is to keep their services and systems running with maximum uptime.
Many of their systems are telecommunication platforms which have very limited support for third party add-ons. Mr. Fishler says, that agentless monitoring in NetCrunch is very huge advantage for monitoring those systems.
“We recently started using NetCrunch as a complementary tool to our existing monitoring tools. NetCrunch, through its simplicity, ease of use, monitoring capabilities and flexibility helps us maintain a high uptime for our services. It detects faults, and provides our engineers with tools for conducting preventive maintenance of our systems.” – says Amir Fishler.
Deployment process was easy, according to Mr. Fishler was easy:
“The installation & upgrade process is very simple. The backup and restore procedure is very useful and effective when you are doing the initial installation as well as when restoring the atlas from backup.”
He also describes main features of NetCrunch, according to his own experience as a user:
“The NetCrunch dashboard is a configurable view that provides a network performance counters’ view of the last hour or 24 hours with information about the most active nodes. It makes preventive maintenance very effective by pointing out the servers that need attention.
The Event Log view in NetCrunch gives you all the information you need to investigate a problem. You can explore both history and current counters’ values directly from the log view.
Events from various sources, like SNMP traps, syslog or Windows Event Log can be communicated using a variety of methods, including SMS and email. Alerts can be easily created and assigned to users or teams (user groups).”
NetCrunch can be useful while solving day to day problems, that sysadmin has to deal with almost every day. Mr Fishler told us about two situations, when alerting and trend view features helped him.
“We noticed that when our voice mail service was experiencing problems, the number of application process threads were doubled. Based on that fact we configured a process alarm that helped us generate an alarm when the situation occured again.”
“The trend view in NetCrunch can show you business processes that do not cross threshold values (i.e. do not generate alarm) but need to be modified. For example, it showed CPU increase at busy hours in the dashboard top view. We suspected that the IT department ran back-up during our busy hours and our suspicion was true. The backup was then rescheduled for lower traffic hours.”
As a summary, Mr Fisher describes NetCrunch as a easy-to-use software: “NetCrunch has helped us to maintain a high uptime for our services through its simplicity, ease of use, monitoring capability, and flexibility.
The features that distinguish NetCrunch from other solutions are its agentless capabilities and the powerful, customizable dashboard, which gives us real-time views of our network, including device type, location, and automatic Layer 2 views.”
Cellcom is the largest mobile operator in Israel. It provides a range of services to over 3.3 million subscribers, including mobile phone services and landline, roaming services for tourists in Israel and for its subscribers abroad and additional services in the field of music, video, mobile office etc.
