New Monthly Featured Customer – Sauder

We’d like to kick off our featured customer blog post this month with one of our favorite customers, Sauder Woodworking Co.

Located in Archbold, OH, Sauder was established in 1934, and has grown into North America’s leading producer of ready-to-assemble (RTA) furniture, and the nation’s fifth largest residential furniture manufacturer. Pro-actively monitoring their network is a crucial part of keeping the business running smoothly.

Sauder’s network:

• Over 150 servers
  
• Satellite monitoring of servers in California
• Plans to set up satellite monitoring of servers in China
• A mixed Windows, Linux, Sun and FreeBSD environment
• 24×7 operation
  

Sauder has been using PA Server Monitor as their main tool to do just this, for over a year. They decided to try out the software in 2013, after many painful experiences with well known competitors’ tools. Since then, they have let us know our software has saved them so much time and trouble that they decided to renew permanently, and have no intentions of using anything else. In fact, they told us the are so happy with it, that felt this was their most crucial network tool.

When they came to us to ask if they could provide a testimonial, we were more than thrilled to oblige! We decided the best way for them to share their experience would be in a video testimonial, so we flew out to Ohio a week later and recorded the video above. Read the full transcript of the entire conversation below.

If you would like to schedule a video testimonial, please write to us at support@poweradmin.com. We would love to feature you and your company in an upcoming Newsletter.

Or, if you’d like to review Power Admin or our software, please feel free to do so on our Facebook page, or on CNET Download.com. This can be as simple as visiting one of these sites to give us a star rating. And we’d love it if you could write a sentence or two about what you liked most.

 

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Power Admin: “Thanks so much for having us out to record this video testimonial. So…tell us your name and role at Sauder?”

Val Stites: “Hi, I’m Val Stites, Computer and Operations Services Manager here at Sauder.

About a year ago, we implemented the PA Server Monitor tool here at Sauder Woodworking. We were looking for a product that could help us monitor and quickly identify if we had any issues.

We got it implemented and have it here on this board in our NOC (Network Operations Center) so that we can quickly see what’s happening with our servers. As you can see, the green, yellow, red gives you a good indication of the health of your servers.

We like having that quick access, and up here, it will also send email alerts, and you can have the monitor up on your desktop.. But this gives everyone in the department a quick view of what is going on in our environment. And we can come over and take a look and see if there is an issue. There is text that tells you what the issue is, so you can quickly fix it. And it gives us overall health.

It’s very good to have it running at all times up like this, because we are a 24 by 7 operation. But the network engineers are actually onsite only during first shift. So the second and third shift technicians…if they see a problem, or hear of a problem, they come over and take a look at our board, and quickly can identify which network engineer they need to contact to correct the issue.

This product is much better than anything we’ve tried in the past. We tried unsuccessfully for about a year and a half with another product, and never were able to get it implemented. This one we had going within hours.

And the other nice thing we like about it, is the alerts are customizable so you don’t get spammed with everything if there are things that are more important to you, you can choose what you want to have monitored and alerts sent to you.

So each of the network engineers can monitor for different things. There are standard things that we set up for everyone to make sure that they get. So, it’s nice for the managers and for the network engineers and for the other staff that have to support the help desk.”

Power Admin: Before you had PA Server Monitor implemented, what were things like, vs. now?

Val: “Before we had this product it took us a lot longer to troubleshoot things. You would get things reported and you didn’t really know which server was causing the problem. A lot of advocations are interconnected with several different servers or pieces or talk to each other, so you might have several areas to look in. With this product you can take a look and see which one might be the first one you’d want to check, so it’s cut down our time to resolution quite a bit.

You can pinpoint which server you probably need to take a look at. Or which advocation on that server is giving you a problem. And also with the email alerts we can be proactive if disk space is starting to run out. Things like that. We don’t have to wait until it impacts the user. We can know about that ahead of time, to go ahead and curtail it before it is an issue.”

 

Power Admin: “What are some good characteristics of just a monitoring product in general? What do you hope to get out of any monitoring product you might choose?”

Val: “What we’ve looked for is ease of use. Like I said the other one we had tried to implement took a really long time. This was pretty much out of the box. It was quick and easy to deploy. We have over 150 servers and we had them all set up within the same day. And you can customize the alerts which is really nice. Some of the other packages, you have to take it as is. And it has to be a global thing.”

On this one you can set up the alerts individually by server. That was really nice to be able to customize that. And also to be able to choose the alerts that you want. The elevation level…things that are are more critical…you can choose that and just have it send those. So it’s customizable in the ease of use. What I also like about it…is it has reporting every day. I have an email that has full report of disk utilization so I can take a quick look at that to see if there’s anything we need to address..any issues that we want to curtail before they happen.

So it does have dashboards, it has reporting, and just the ease of use is why we really like it.”

 

Power Admin: “Tell us your name and what you do here.”

David: “My name is David Brenner. I work in IT. I’m the Client Technologies Engineer here at Sauder Woodworking. Basically in charge of things that are right up front to the user…internet, remote access, email…things like that.”

 

Power Admin: “Hi David, tell us a little bit about Sauder”

David Brenner: “Sauder is the #1 RTA furniture, ready to assemble furniture company in the country. We’re third generation, family owned…private. We roughly employ a couple thousand people. We’ve got offices here and a couple distribution centers in California and China.”

 

Power Admin: “What kind of IT challenges do you have here at Sauder?”

David: “Making sure everything is running properly. We’ve had some challenges in the past with being more reactive than proactive I would say. Usually getting called that there’s a problem rather than finding the problem before it impacts the end user.”

 

Power Admin: “How did you handle problems before you were using Server Monitor, you know…something goes down, what was that like?”

David: “Generally, if something went down before Server Monitor, we would get calls from end users saying “this doesn’t work” or “can’t get to this” and we would have to hunt down the problem or find the person that’s in charge of that particular area and see what server, what information they might have. Generally like I said, it’s primarily reactive. We were getting called rather than noticing the problem first.”

 

Power Admin: “How’s PA Server Monitor helped you in your day to day routine?”

David: “It allows us to recognize what issues are cropping up. When we get the different colored monitor…the green, the yellow, and the red.

Plus we get email notifications of events that might be happening; low disk space.

We have the opportunity to be a little more proactive and resolve what appear to be an upcoming problems before they actually impact the end user. It give us a better opportunity to keep things running and makes the end user a little more happy with us.

 

Power Admin: “Tell us…about how much IT equipment are you monitoring?”

David: “We are monitoring roughly 150 to 160 servers. A variety of flavors. We’ve got some Windows OS which is our primary server OS. We have a few Linux servers, various flavors of that. We’ve got some Sun OS. Some FreeBSD. We also are using it to monitor our iSeries. And there are about 11 partitions on those.

We’re also using a satellite version of the product out in our offices in California to monitor those. There’s a few servers out there and we are working towards and planning in the near future to monitor servers over in Asia with the same similar satellite setup. It’s working very well for us.

 

Power Admin: “So…what do you love about PA Server Monitor?”

David: “I like the fact that it is very easy to set new [monitors] up. The ability to copy monitors from one server to another is really nice. I like the ability that there’s all kind of monitors you can set up. We generally start with a basic…CPU usage, disk usage, disk space things like that.

I just like the flexibility that…you can pretty much monitor whatever you want to monitor. And you can set it up relatively quickly. You don’t have to spend, you know, days trying to figure out…oh how do I set this up. Pretty intuitive just to go in say…oh I want to do this, here’s how I do it. Set it up. I like that it can notify people. That it can text. We’ve got it set up with some texting.

So even if you’re not paying attention to your email all the time, critical notifications you can get on your text and see that. I like the flexibility of being able to monitor multiple OSs…not just Windows because we have that.

You know, like I said the iSeries and Linux products…those are all things I find really….and I like the overall display of the monitor. The graphics you can see it quickly point out…hey here’s a problem server…you need to look at this. We’ve come to rely on that. Oh we see something red, we better do something. It’s very nice.”

 

Power Admin: “So, Val…tell us how much YOU love Server Monitor?”

Val: “Server Monitor is probably my favorite tool that we have to monitor our network and our servers. Everyone on our team really enjoys using it. It’s the best tool that we have found. If I had to give up, if they said I have to cut back and get rid of some of the tools that we use, that would be the last one I would want to get rid of, because it has helped us so much and it provides so much information. And allows us to be proactive. Everyone here is excited about the product, love using it, it’s so easy to use and it has given us more than we even thought when we were looking for a product. We really like it and, like I said, I wouldn’t want to give it up for anything.

We have been challenged on it [PA Server Monitor] by some other people who think that it’s not…that don’t see the value in it. And they keep saying, why do you guys like this that much…because we do talk about it a lot.”

David: “But when you start seeing 3 or 4 things go red on there, by the time somebody lets us know, we’re already moving on it.”

Val: “And the guys love it because we, like I said we had tried another product, and it just took forever and we never did get it implemented.”

David: “No that was painful, cause I got to do a lot of that. It was awful.”

Val: “This was just so easy and they really like that. We like it!”