"WNA Online Services" is a large internet service provider company. It provides wireless internet services for hundreds of hotels, airports and hospitals in North America, about 200 clients total. Mike Miller, the senior system manager at "WNA Online Services", experienced a problem: he was charged to find a cost effective solution for monitoring network devices and services for all clients with ability to notify a tech by email and SMS in case of troubles. Taking into account that there are about 20 monitoring objects for each client (including the network equipment on the ISP's and client's side), the monitoring product should cover more than 4000 objects total all over the continent. Mike had found a range of good monitoring products with necessary functionality, but the number of monitoring objects (checks, monitors, another words) was limited by license. For example, one product offered each monitor for $10, so it was about $40000 for all objects, another one had price at $45000 for 3000 and more monitors. In financial crisis, it was unacceptable, and Mike's attention was attracted by Alchemy Eye, a small monitoring product with full-blown functionality and web interface. Alchemy Eye has licensing by server that allows to use unlimited number of monitors. Sure, one instance of such small program cannot process 4000 objects at the same time, but even 2-3 copies of Alchemy Eye for $200 each is more cost attractive solution, without any doubts. Anyway, the total price of Alchemy Eye was several dozen times as low as the price of its competitor's products.
Another requirement was the web interface that could duplicate the GUI and allow the support engineers to watch the network state and internet service quality in real time over the Internet as the access to the Alchemy Eye server's console was very limited. Also, the web interface should have a possibility to delimit access to different techs, so that each of them could view only the monitor area he/she is responsible for.
That feature was quickly implemented by the Alchemy Lab team by Mike's request.
Besides that, it was possible to integrate Alchemy Eye with the customer management system running earlier at WNA Online Services. In order to implement it, the statistics log was saved to an SQL database that was linked with the CMS database. Thereby, a technical support engineer could check the state of remote devices on the client's site at any time.
As a result, "WNA Online Services" had got a reasonably priced yet universal and functional monitoring solution that allowed to optimize the process of controlling multiple and distributed network devices and services.