Sutter County Superintendent of Schools Office
Network Instruments Observer - Success Story

Sutter County Superintendent of Schools Office in Yuba City, California, is the county educational authority that provides administrative service and support to 12 California school districts of varying sizes-in fact, one school district includes 20 schools while others include only a single school of between 60 and 600 students. The county office employs more than 200 people who offer accounting/payroll, administrative, and other support services to the schools, and provides regional occupation programs (ROP) and all special education for the districts.

The Problem
Kevin Conde is the network administrator for the Sutter County Schools. His job was to network the schools' computers-which now number 200 Macintoshes and PCs-and provide each of the small school districts with high-speed Internet connections. Conde also acts as a technical consultant for the schools, helping them make wise purchasing decisions with limited school funds.

Once his NT-based WAN was in place, Conde-like any experienced LAN/WAN designer-began looking for a product that would help him analyze and monitor the network. However, the product would have to offer lots of features-Including compatibility with Macintoshes-at a price a struggling California school system could afford.

And Conde needed this product quickly; a popular application on the network was misbehaving, and all fingers were pointing to the network setup as the problem. Conde needed a tool that was intuitive enough to use immediately. Of course, it would have to be effective and accurate in monitoring the network's performance, thereby proving that the application itself was the problem and that the sooner they got to work on fixing it, the sooner everyone could go back to performing their critical support services.

"The application in question was one we used at one of our busiest sites," Conde explains. "When it failed to perform well, its designers suspected that it might be the network rather than the application. I knew that if I found the right analyzer product, it would be just what I needed to gather the data they needed to pinpoint the real problem."

The Solution
Conde continues, "I did a lot of shopping around before I made a choice. Because I work for a school entity, my funding is always limited but my expectations remain high. When I found Network Instruments' Observer product, I knew it was just what we needed-a lot of features at a very low price."

Observer supports AppleTalk as well as the more traditional TCP/IP and IPX, and NetBEUI/NetBIOS, DECnet, and SNA, so Conde got the Macintosh support he needed. And because Network Instruments offers educational discounts, he got the product at the price the schools could afford.

As a Windows-based network monitoring tool, Observer made it easy for Conde to quickly get a good graphical view of the network. "After I set up Observer to run from my notebook computer, I sat down with one of the designers of the application we were having trouble with, and we watched network activity as several users ran the application. Observer showed us that the long-term bandwidth utilization indicated such low bandwidth use-5 percent, with a brief spike to 9 percent-that it was obvious that the network itself was functioning very efficiently and had bandwidth to spare!" he says. From that point, Conde says, it was simply a matter of addressing the real culprit-the application-to eliminate the problem and enable users to resume a higher level of productivity.

Conde says Observer make it much easier for him to keep the network performing at a high level because it captures all packets and identifies their type. "That really helps me pin down a problem on a network that includes a lot of Apple printers. You see," he explains, "Apple printers are very verbose-they advertise themselves a lot. When they do, they can cause collisions on the network. But because packet capture show me which piece of equipment is causing the problem, there's a much better chance that I can correct the situation before it causes even more trouble."

Another similar time-saving feature is Observer's Discovery Mode, says Conde. "This captures all the network addresses on the LAN, stores them in a table, and assigns them names or IP addresses," he explains. "Most packet analyzers only show you the hard-coded address of the NIC, and that doesn't do the administrator much good when he or she is trying to figure out just which machine is malfunctioning. If I have the IP address, though, I can trace it to the offending machine and resolve the situation."

Conde has also found that Observer is helping him justify purchases. "Observer showed me that there were some collision issues on this network, which supported my going to the administrators and suggesting they buy Ethernet switches. Now that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 has provided us with funding to upgrade and improve our computer systems, we're going to be able to add seven Ethernet switches and bump the backbone to 100Mbps, which will dramatically improve the network's performance," Conde says. "I might have been able to sell the administrators on buying these switches anyway, but Observer allowed me to actually show them the problem.

"Observer has been a very valuable addition to our network," Conde concludes. "It's enabled me to do in an hour or two what might otherwise take ten times that long. Observer is one of those tools that you don't need every day of the week; but when you do need it, you really need it. And because it's priced so low, it's affordable for even the most cost-conscious organizations like ours."

Contact: Kevin Conde 916-822-5115 ext. 103