Vulcan is a privately held company founded by Paul Allen and his sister Jody in 1986 to establish and oversee the family’s diverse business activities and philanthropic endeavors.
The Situation
The Vulcan HR team that handles payroll was having issues with the printers that were printing payroll checks. There were various incidents where printers were going down and because the team had no monitoring in place to be notified when this occurred, the only way to catch this issue was having someone physically check each printer in person. Identifying this issue would sometimes take hours or days and would therefore cause delays in the checks being printed and delivered on time. The IT team was asked to investigate what was happening and if it could be fixed.
The Solution
The Vulcan IT team discovered that the printers were not processing printing commands after falling idle, so he decided to use LogicMonitor to monitor the printers and alert the HR team when the machines would go into an idle state. This was the first immediate solution so that the HR team could at least be notified when their printers went to sleep. The IT team then decided to test if they could ping the devices via the collector to “wake” them so that someone doesn’t have to physically be there to re-activate them. The testing worked and they have now implemented this so that the printers are ready to fire at any given moment, no matter who’s around or not.
The Results
With the help of LogicMonitor, Vulcan IT was able to provide additional value to end users that normally have no interaction with LogicMonitor and help ensure that Vulcan employees are getting paid on time!