In the more than 30 years since STL Communications first began installing and marketing equipment from AT&T, the St. Louis-based managed service provider, integrator, networking firm and IT consultancy has guided its customers through the radical changes shaping how businesses communicate and stay connected. Today, the company’s customers, which include firms from across industries, rely on STL as the trusted partner with the expertise they need to effectively use the most productive technologies.
“We help our customers use technology to serve their customers even better by providing the best voice, data, wireless, video and infrastructure solutions available,” says Steve Leidholdt, founder, president and CEO of STL. “We guide them through the systems and technologies required to be successful in business today.”
While STL traces its heritage to voice communications, over the years its offerings increased to encompass the wide range of networks, software, hardware and software today’s companies need. These include more advanced protocols for voice communications such as Session Initiation Protocol or SIP.
“In many of these disciplines, the complexity of the components involved has increased in line with the benefits of adoption,” adds Leidholdt. “SIP is a great example. The savings and performance gains are extensive, but it’s too complex for most organizations to handle alone. For that reason, many of our customers turn to us for a complete managed service.”
Of course, STL demands 100 percent uptime for the infrastructure it uses to deliver managed services, which often include products and technologies from multiple vendors working together. As the volume of these services grew, the team knew it needed to augment its existing network monitoring capabilities.
Specifically, it needed a solution that would show not only the performance of STL’s infrastructure in real time, but also the granular details required to immediately identify potential problems, and in the event an issue arises, quickly troubleshoot the cause. The technology also needed to be a highly flexible product able to monitor solutions from the vendors and partners STL works with that is highly customizable and able to function flawlessly in numerous environments. This included its integration with customers’ legacy infrastructure. Finally, it had to be cost effective and be something that STL could confidently recommend to customers for internal usage.
STL had always monitored its infrastructure, but the product it used was expensive. More importantly, it didn’t offer the flexibility needed to deploy it in diverse
environments or to configure it for specific use cases. Leidholdt and the team at STL were drawn to PRTG Network Monitor because of the ability it gave them to oversee their entire infrastructure and view what matters most at any given point in time all in a glance at dashboards that are easily configured to show the most salient information.
For these reasons, PRTG was selected. Paessler offers more than 200 pre-configured, purpose-built sensors and custom sensors can be added as needed. Click below to read the entire case study: