Case Study

Darley Limited

At a glance
  • Regular downtime on the Local Area Network (LAN)
  • Instability and packet loss. Poor quality and dropping calls.
  • Troubleshooting losing valuable time.
  • Device reachability impacted. Limited reporting.

Background

Darley is one of the UK’s most famous names in print, packaging & bespoke design solutions, specialising in wet glue labels for the food and drinks industries. It’s also the largest producer of beer bottle labels in the country. Appropriately enough, Darley is based at the heart of the brewing industry in Burton upon Trent.

Spectrum has been working with Darley for several years, helping them to achieve greater efficiencies through their connectivity solutions.

Challenges

Darley was experiencing regular downtime on their Local Area Network (LAN), impacting device reachability in all areas of the internal network, and hitting many users at once. At first, this was assumed to be an outage on the data connection, or the router hardware which we had provided.

 

Problems were compounded following a migration of their voice products to take their voice communication system from On-Premise to a Hosted product, meaning that voice traffic was also utilising the data circuit. While voice traffic is low in bandwidth utilisation, it does require a very stable network. There was some instability and packet loss causing poor quality calls, and of course, any reboot in the router was causing drops to voice calls.

 

The data connection was not at fault, but Darley was still losing valuable time troubleshooting, and while Spectrum assisted, most devices at the site were not supported and the infrastructure utilised non-enterprise equipment, meaning that reporting was limited.

 

There were several theories about what was causing the instability on the LAN, including issues with power supplies and cables, or overloading of resources in the network, but without a clear diagnostics tool, each aspect would have to be swapped out or tested individually, a time and labour-consuming process. As equipment in the LAN was from different suppliers, there was no method to evidence the source of the network faults. Even the standard System Logs were deleted each time each device rebooted.

Solutions

LANtern was installed into the customer site, allowing us to monitor the device reachability of all of their endpoints, using their IP addresses. This includes routers, switches and their industrial printing kit.

 

Due to LANtern’s comprehensive dashboards, it became quick and simple to eliminate the areas of the network which were already operating correctly. By default, historical data is tracked for 28 days, and because the LANtern is on-premise, data was captured and stored even when the site was unconnected to the network, meaning that for the first time, our engineers were be provided with information about what happened at site immediately before and during the downtime.

LANtern’s flexible reporting tools and dashboards, enabled Spectrum to make a raft of recommendations to assist Darley

Stewart Hughes

The Outcome

Basing our findings on LANtern’s flexible reporting tools and dashboards, Spectrum was able to make a raft of recommendations to assist Darley and prevent further unplanned and costly downtime.

 

LANtern was able to diagnose a longstanding issue between the router and two switches on site, where a command sent by either of the switches caused the router to reboot, causing all equipment to lose internet connection while the router reloaded. LANtern also uncovered that an old printer, previously assumed to be disconnected, was still connected and consuming power. The printer was subsequently turned off.

 

Further instability was caused by an unused VPN included as part of the router software. Darley had not been aware of it, but attacks against the VPN occasionally led to a heavy influx of traffic, causing drops to the router and internal downtime, even though the WAN did not experience a corresponding drop. Spectrum disabled this VPN, and all incidents of this type ended.

 

With the help of LANtern, Darley was able to manage it’s network efficiently by utilising dashboards that effectively display the outputs from IT equipment, which helped them understand the data easily. This information was then used to identify the cause of outages and solve the problem more promptly, with less need for engineering resources and reducing the need for unnecessary equipment replacement.

Frequently Asked Questions



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