Tracker keeps tabs on its technical network dexterity with Synaq

Tracker, Africa's leading vehicle tracking company, continues to maintain a close eye on its customers, safe in the knowledge that its network infrastructure remains efficient, up-to-date and proactively monitored by its IT supply partner Synaq.

Synaq is a national provider of managed Linux and open source services. The company was recently contracted by Tracker to implement a system that would increase the ability to manage and control what is a substantially large and complex IT environment.

Tracker has been operational in South Africa since October 1996. It has developed a service portfolio, incorporating a comprehensive range of technology products such as Tracker Retrieve, Tracker Alert, SkyTrax and Tracker Selftest, all of which is designed to ensure the safety of drivers and efficiency of vehicles throughout South Africa.

Its national presence stretches from its headquarters through to an extensive network of Tracker base stations located across the country. The company has 467 000 vehicles under its care.

"Tracker is a company with over a thousand employees and has over 150 servers that are proactively monitored, managed and maintained to run the business," explains Yossi Hasson, MD of Synaq. "With such a large environment it is often difficult to ascertain where a single fault on a network lies. This can result in hours of downtime and in the business that Tracker operates, downtime could have far-reaching, serious consequences."

With this in mind, Synaq looked to implement an open source software solution that would provide the necessary level of proactive, automated troubleshooting and response capability.

"We elected to implement Nagios infrastructure monitoring and management solution. This had to be customised to fit in with Tracker's unique heterogeneous environment made up of an array of different systems, including Linux, Microsoft, Oracle and its own custom solutions. It was imperative for Tracker that the solution enabled them to detect strings and logs - such as RF Signal alignment strengths and error messages," adds Hasson.

The rationale behind the selection of Nagios was based on its offer of a high level holistic overview of a company's systems and different business silos.

"Tracker base stations are made up of unique hardware and software custom-developed for Tracker. This equipment works through a radio network and integrates with its custom designed Oracle database. This architecture allows the company to monitor the relevant statistics of vehicles under its care. Our objective was to integrate our monitoring into this custom environment in order to pull critical warnings and relevant information used by the Tracker operations team," says Hasson.

"The advantage we had with Nagios monitoring is that the solution is a modular framework that is open source and allows one to custom-develop plug-ins or checks in order to close any off-the-shelf monitoring gaps," he adds.

Synaq continues to provide infrastructure management and support services to Tracker and both parties look forward to a long-term association.