Standard School District advances multi-campus network management using Auvik
A case study from Standard School District
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Standard School District saw significant benefits with our Network Management
Operational efficiency
Auvik has helped the Standard School District team streamline their operations, with automation reducing time spent on time-intensive manual tasks.
Gained time back for bigger projects
While not having to spend so much time on day-to-day troubleshooting issues, Auvik has freed up the team’s time to get stuck into some bigger projects.
Faster troubleshooting
By scanning and mapping the network, Auvik’s collector has allowed the team to pinpoint issues and fix them quickly, often before the end user has even noticed there’s something wrong.
Improved network visibility
Junior-level techs are now able to find and resolve issues much more easily, reducing escalations and freeing up the time of more senior staff.
About Standard School District
At the turn of the 20th century, oil was discovered just north of
Bakersfield, California. People from all walks of life flooded to
the area to support the Standard Oil business and the Oildale
community was established.
With any new community comes the need to educate its youth.
And in 1909, the Standard School District opened its doors
with 27 students and one teacher. Today, the Standard School
District encompasses multiple K-12 educational campuses and
serves over 3,000 students
“The automation of the network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. They can see if it is something as simple as a power issue in a wing of a building. This lets them pick the low hanging fruit. Then, if a configuration needs a more skilled person, they can easily escalate it.”
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The challenges that Standard School District faced
Before Auvik, the Standard School District tried a few open-source tools to manage the network but found them to be too configuration heavy and cumbersome to use. The time it was taking to deploy and properly set up these tools was more of a time suck than they were worth. One after another was
eventually abandoned.
Working with a limited budget and a small team, the team needed a solution that could offer a great ROI and top-class support. It had to be affordable, easy to set up, and could automatically map the network to provide visibility, access device configurations to back them up and be able to monitor events in order to prevent bigger user issues.
How Auvik solved their challenges
Faster troubleshooting with real-time visibility
The team lacked visibility into their network. Using Auvik’s collector to scan the network and map the topology of the network, the team can now find problems before they become apparent to the end user. And they can do this without leaving their desk. With Auvik’s remote management and command line options, there’s no more having to traverse the campus to find that switch or dead port.
Automated device configuration backups
Creating manual configuration backups for network devices can be time-consuming, and prone to being out of date. Using Auvik’s out-of-the-box configuration backups to automate this process allows the network team to get their time back to focus on other priorities. Standard School District’s Director of IT, Jeff Davis, discusses, “…we would then have to go from device to device, get it to spit out its config, copy it to the clipboard, paste it to a file, and organize it all. That is all now automatic, which is great.”
Elaborate network mapping that helps discover and resolve
When it comes to the automated mapping of the network, the team can easily identify and if need be, raise concerns to higher-level techs using Auvik. Jeff says, “We can look at our network and visually see what’s going on and if there are any issues.”, Before Auvik, it was difficult to track down an individual device to perform simple operations like changing a port setting or change a switch from a printer to a phone, or assign VLANs. Having an easy-to-use tool, like Auvik, built with out-of-the-box monitoring and alerting, allows junior-level techs to find and resolve issues directly, which frees up time for senior-level staff.
Ease of set-up, use, and support
The ease of setup and configuration was a huge factor for the team at Standard School District. Deployment is simple with Auvik and requires minimal configuration when SNMP and WMI are enabled. Jeff’s team had the entire school district’s network up and running within Auvik in just under an hour. Another great aspect of using Auvik? There’s no maintenance required. Staff no longer have to worry about manual patches and updates to the system, or waste time notifying and navigating system downtime for end users. “Auvik has been really handy. I really can’t say enough good things about it. I have just been really impressed with the quality of the product, support, and training. It just works well.” says Jeff.
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“The automation of the network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. They can see if it is something as simple as a power issue in a wing of a building. This lets them pick the low hanging fruit. Then, if a configuration needs a more skilled person, they can easily escalate it.”