Tomas Bata Regional Hospital in Zlín Gains Complete Visibility into IT Infrastructure and Network Traffic with Progress WhatsUp Gold and Progress Flowmon
Industries:
Healthcare and Life SciencesChallenge
- Lack of end-to-end visibility into IT infrastructure and network activity.
- IT teams often learned about issues from doctors and medical staff instead of monitoring tools.
- Time-consuming management of an open-source monitoring platform with limited professional support.
- Expiring SSL certificates causing unplanned outages of critical web applications.
Solution
- Deployed Progress® WhatsUp Gold® for proactive monitoring of servers, network devices, services, and critical laboratory systems.
- Deployed Progress® Flowmon® for detailed network traffic analysis and faster root-cause diagnosis of application and network issues.
- Implemented role-based dashboards, SMS alerts, and SSL certificate monitoring to improve operational awareness.
- Enabled retrospective analysis of network communications to quickly identify the source of performance issues and intermittent outages.
Result
- Transition from reactive to proactive IT infrastructure monitoring.
- Prevented unplanned web application outages with automated SSL certificate expiration alerts.
- Accelerated diagnosis of network and application issues through detailed traffic analysis.
- Used objective data to resolve application performance disputes with external vendors.
- Greater stability of IT services and improved perception of the IT department throughout the hospital.
Full Story
Challenge
The hospital's IT department had long used the open-source tool Zabbix for infrastructure monitoring. While it fulfilled its basic function, managing it became increasingly demanding. It lacked professional support and adapting the system to the hospital's specific requirements required a significant amount of time. Even routine adjustments or implementing new requirements often meant hours or days of searching for information in documentation and guides. Instead of developing the infrastructure, IT specialists devoted a significant portion of their capacity to maintaining the monitoring tool itself.
An even bigger challenge, however, was the lack of visibility into actual network traffic. When users struggled with slow applications, random outages or performance issues, the IT team had no data available to help quickly determine the actual cause. Administrators learned about most incidents only when doctors or medical staff called in. In practice, the hospital relied on user reports as its primary means of detecting issues.
The expiration of SSL certificates was also a recurring problem. Without timely warning, certificates would expire unexpectedly, resulting in unplanned outages of critical web applications—usually at the least convenient time.
Flowmon gave us real visibility into what's happening on the network for the first time. When we were resolving a dispute with an application vendor over its performance, we had data in hand that clearly showed the actual cause of the problem. Without Flowmon, we would have had a hard time proving it.
Tomáš Holík
Head of Infrastructure at Tomas Bata Regional Hospital
Solution
Proactive Monitoring and Complete Infrastructure Visibility
When looking for a replacement for Zabbix, the IT department considered two leading infrastructure monitoring products – the Progress® WhatsUp Gold® solution and PRTG. The choice was more interesting given that the hospital's system admin, Jaroslav Šena, had nearly eight years of experience with PRTG from his previous role and had originally considered deploying it at KNTB.
However, after a thorough evaluation, the hospital selected the WhatsUp Gold solution. Two factors ultimately drove the decision—a more favorable purchase price and the ability to automatically generate a visual map of the entire network infrastructure. This visualization of the relationships between devices quickly became one of the most valuable tools for day-to-day environment management.
Today, WhatsUp Gold monitors approximately 200 virtual servers, 400 switches, routers, firewalls, UPS units, physical servers and other critical infrastructure components. Monitoring also covers key application services and specialized laboratory devices that collect data from temperature sensors in refrigeration and freezing units used to store blood and biological samples. Continuous monitoring of their availability helps prevent situations that could lead to the loss of irreplaceable biological material.
Detailed Network Traffic Visibility and Faster Problem Diagnosis
Alongside the deployment of the WhatsUp Gold solution, the hospital also invested in the Progress® Flowmon® platform as part of a CZK 50 million grant-funded project. The IT team already had positive experience with the product from the past, so it was an easy decision to make.
During the project, the organization considered two specialized solutions for network traffic analysis. In the end, it chose the Flowmon platform, which met the project's technical requirements as well as the hospital's budgetary constraints.
The main goal was to eliminate a fundamental weakness; the inability to analyze network communication and precisely determine the causes of performance problems. When users reported slow applications or random outages, the IT department knew a problem existed but lacked sufficient data to diagnose it quickly.
Unlike WhatsUp Gold, which continuously monitors the availability of devices and services, Flowmon primarily serves as a specialized analytical tool. It allows retrospective analysis of network communication, identifies the causes of hard-to-reproduce incidents and precisely determines where a problem actually originated. In other words, while WhatsUp Gold alerts teams when a problem occurs, the Flowmon solution helps explain why it happened.
Result
The way the IT department works has also changed significantly. Every administrator has a dedicated screen displaying a WhatsUp Gold dashboard, providing continuous visibility into the status of the entire infrastructure. For critical systems, in addition to email alerts, SMS notifications are also set up via a GSM gateway, so responsible staff are informed of an incident immediately, even outside regular working hours.
“Thanks to greater stability and faster problem resolution, doctors and nurses feel that systems work more reliably than before,” shared Tomáš Holík, Head of Infrastructure at the hospital. “WhatsUp Gold has helped us significantly improve the perception of the IT department throughout the hospital.“
One of the most significant benefits proved to be the Application Performance Management (APM) module. The hospital was resolving a dispute with an enterprise application vendor who claimed that KNTB's infrastructure was responsible for the application's slow response times. However, analysis of data from the Flowmon platform clearly demonstrated that the cause lay in inefficiently written application code on the vendor's side. Thanks to objective data, the IT team was able to substantiate its conclusions and secure corrective action without a lengthy back-and-forth.
The Flowmon platform helped resolve recurring problems with payment terminals in the hospital pharmacies. Detailed analysis of network communication made it possible to quickly identify the cause of intermittent outages without having to laboriously go through the logs of individual systems. The platform also helped identify configuration deficiencies in core network services, such as DNS and DHCP.
In addition to the functionality itself, the IT team also values the quality of Progress's Czech technical support. When handling more complex tasks or creating specific reports, administrators have direct access to specialists who are well acquainted with the customer's environment. This eliminates the need for lengthy navigation through automated support systems or chatbot communication. For selected analytical tasks, the hospital also collaborates with external experts who help supplement the internal team's capacity.
The hospital also openly acknowledges that it does not yet make full use of the platform's potential, particularly in the area of advanced threat detection through the Anomaly Detection System (ADS) module. The reason, however, is not technological limitations but rather limited staffing capacity and everyday operational priorities. After the initial setup, the IT department therefore focused its attention primarily on areas that had an immediate impact on the availability and performance of critical systems. Going forward, it plans to gradually expand its use of the platform's security features.
Synergy of Both Solutions: From Infrastructure Monitoring to Rapid Root-Cause Diagnosis
By deploying WhatsUp Gold network monitoring and Flowmon cybersecurity, Krajská nemocnice Tomáše Bati gained a comprehensive view of its entire IT environment—from the availability of individual devices and services to detailed analysis of network communication and application behavior.
The two platforms complement each other. The WhatsUp Gold solution continuously monitors the infrastructure and immediately alerts on outages or abnormal states. The Flowmon solution then provides the detailed information needed to determine the actual cause of the problem. The IT team no longer has to search at length for where an error originated and can instead focus on resolving it quickly. The result is shorter diagnosis times, more efficient incident resolution and less impact from outages on the hospital's daily operations.
The Flowmon solution has also helped with strategic decisions about further infrastructure development. Thanks to objective data on the actual causes of performance problems, the IT department gained clearer grounds for investment planning. For example, it turned out that modernizing selected parts of the infrastructure would bring greater benefit than further expanding monitoring. The platform has thus become not only a tool for diagnosing incidents but also an important source of information for long-term IT development planning.
WhatsUp Gold and Flowmon complement each other excellently and together cover all our needs in infrastructure monitoring and network traffic analysis. Right now, there isn't a single feature we're missing for managing our environment.
Tomáš Holík
Head of Infrastructure at Tomas Bata Regional Hospital