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How Penn State Monitors For a Smart, Healthy Network

Not so long ago, Penn State had big network problems.

Think tons of network traffic, buildings dropping offline — that sort of thing.

When Tom Walker first started working at PSU four years ago, broadcast traffic was pushing 90,000 packets per hour. He was on the phone almost every single night because devices were down or had to be reset.

Tom and his team reduced broadcast traffic over the years, from 90,000 down to about 30,000. But that took a half-dozen different tools and two network integrity analysts dedicated to looking for anomalies. Now, they’re getting into the nitty-gritty of refining and maintaining system health — especially as the network grows year over year.

With Visual BACnet Site Monitoring, Penn State managed to reduce network traffic with just one platform. The program highlighted problems they never could have caught on their own.

 

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