Case study in association with Paessler
With close to 400 stores and a further 20 offices, showrooms and warehouse locations, the clothing brand Pepe Jeans has a complex network. It uses 6,000 sensors to monitor the status of LAN and WAN links. Every store is a remote location that usually has at least three devices such as a router, switch or access point.
“We can see unusual traffic patterns and quickly detect if things are not as they should be. With the sensors that provide insight, it’s very helpful to discover what’s going on,” Xavier Marchador, Pepe Jeans
Over the years, as the company added more and more devices, its old monitoring tool was ‘blind’ and as a result, the company didn’t have full visibility of is network. What’s more, as a fast-moving retail business, Pepe Jeans often needs to open new stores within a matter of weeks, or change location, which involves adding or removing devices on the network regularly.
Senior IT network engineer at Pepe Jeans, Xavier Marchador, needed a tool that could monitor many different types of devices, with an easy interface and reliable support from the vendor. He had seen what Paessler’s network monitoring solution PRTG could do, so he requested an updated maintenance contract and a new release that could handle greater numbers of sensors. The deployment process was easy.
Marchador likes the mapping feature in PRTG, which provides an easy visual graph of LAN and WAN performance and the health status of every device in near-real-time. “PRTG provides everything we need from communication and systems, bandwidth and users,” he says.
PRTG also gives Pepe Jeans accurate, statistical information about network stability. It can use this insight to compare performance against the communications provider’s service level agreement for a particular line. “We can demonstrate where we need to invest more money or resources. We use data to get more budget from the business for new devices,” Marchador adds.
Pepe Jeans’ global network. (Image: Pepe Jeans)
Most importantly of all, PRTG provides transparency and visibility of network performance. As a result, Pepe Jeans rarely if ever experiences network downtime. PRTG identifies the source of any network issues before any possible downtime can happen. With this information, Marchador can quickly see if one of the locations on the network is having difficulties with its bandwidth, and he can proactively route some network traffic to the backup line, removing congestion and maintaining uptime.
Like many large companies, Pepe Jeans has various departments that work on projects which rely on the IT systems and communication infrastructure. Using PRTG, Marchador and the IT department have a map view of live network performance to be able to show colleagues where bandwidth is available.
Overall, Marchador says that PRTG provides transparency, visibility and accountability. “If the network is not down, but there is degradation of the network environment, it can be difficult to detect if there is an issue. PRTG gives warning messages and alerts or it can compare performance to metrics from past weeks or months. We can see unusual traffic patterns and quickly detect if things are not as they should be. With the sensors that provide insight, it’s very helpful to discover what’s going on: that might be a specific machine generating more traffic than it should, or sometimes it’s malware, or bad usage of resources. Sometimes, it’s just a driver interface which is not working properly. That level of insight is impossible to have without PRTG,” he concludes.
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