Company Profile
Watch Communications, founded in 1992, delivers wireless TV, internet, and phone service via microwave fixed wireless to residential and business customers. Watch Communications serves more than 10,000 customers in the Internet sector, with more than 475 wireless POPs spanning across Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois.
Business Needs
Watch Communications’ network has more than 2,500 devices that provide connectivity to more than 10,000 customers. With such a large number of pieces of equipment that are so valuable to their business model, they needed a solution that could tell them the nitty-gritty information about their equipment, not just if the equipment was up or down. They were looking for a product that could give them digestible information on connection counts, signal strengths, dynamic routing peer counts and states, temperatures, battery status, among other metrics indicating a failing circuit, overloaded equipment, environmental issues, and more.
“We are proud to use Nagios, and we will continue to convert any acquired networks to use our Nagios installation as the monitoring solution ASAP after the acquisition. We are in love with Nagios. It is truly another member of our team and a vital part of our business.”
-Adam Kennedy, Network and Systems Engineering, Watch Communications
The Challenge
When using other monitoring solutions, Watch Communications realized that just checking a simple SNMP value wasn’t enough. They needed something that could act on the data and compare it to previous or other checks. They found that other monitoring solutions didn’t have the capability to use easily programmable plugins or required a contract to have custom plugins written at a very high cost. Watch Communications also wanted a custom alerting and response solution beyond the standard email alerts offered by other monitoring solutions.
Why Nagios?
Nagios helped Watch Communications monitor all of their 2,500 devices and 8,800 device services within an average of 2-minute intervals. Nagios’ network of open-source customizable plugins and customized alerting solutions made it a great fit for Watch Communications’ needs.
The Bottom Line
Watch Communications has been able to quickly identify incidents, from power issues to connection issues to environmental problems to theft, all within minutes of the problem occurring.
Watch Communications used Nagios to build custom SMS response scripts, which allowed them to acknowledge and handle alerts remotely—an essential process when a large network outage occurs and all IT staff need to be notified immediately.
“We have been able to work with Nagios to determine our best possible interfaces and workflows to make our monitoring system work with us instead of against us,” says Kennedy. “The flexibility and expandability of Nagios are second to none.”
