Adista Hosted Services is a provider of internet and IT managed services in France. Founded in 1981 as an IT integrator, Adista has grown into a turnkey provider of broadband access, IP networks, IT managed services, and IT systems integration with over 4,000 public sectors and SME customers. Their 10-person IT team uses Progress WhatsUp Gold to monitor network issues for over 1500 devices they manage for their clients.
Each of Adista’s clients have different requirements in terms of what level of monitoring they need – some customers have basic monitoring, others also have email and text alerts enabled to notify clients if something goes wrong, and some even have web access where they can log in to see the status of their machines and devices by way of a WhatsUp Gold screen.
However, in order to add devices for new or existing clients, the Adista IT team used to have to enter those devices manually, one by one. While WhatsUp Gold has a powerful discover feature, not all client devices are accessible to Adista, the IT team usually lacks credentials needed for access and the client only wants specific devices monitored in the first place. Adds or changes for one or two devices at a time are part of the regular support process, but onboarding new clients sometimes mean a much larger list of devices that can cause problems.
When given a list of 50 or more new devices (usually just IP addresses and IDs in a CSV file) the Adista team is looking at a tedious, time-consuming manual process with a lot of potential for human error. Maxime Palmieri, System Plan Administrator, was determined to figure out a better way. He learned about WhatsUp Gold’s REST API capabilities and quickly developed a solution with PowerShell. Maxime said “So this was a task assigned to a colleague who said it will take me all afternoon to enter all the IP addresses. And I said I don't want you to enter all that manually. You could make mistakes, or you will lose time. I prefer to lose time on my side trying to create an API."
Maxime leveraged the REST API to automatically import individual machines line by line from a single CSV file. His solution was simple, elegant, and effective. Maxime first creates a single machine manually in the WhatsUp Gold web interface. His script then clones that machine using the software API retrieves the ID of the first listed machine in the URL, and uses a GET request to copy all of the configurations. The script goes on to then create all the devices using the information retrieved from the previous request, and changing the name, FQDN, and IP in a loop using the Patch request.
By using the REST API, Maxime automated a task that would take a member of the Adista IT team all afternoon if they relied on the CSV with the name and IP address. He also eliminated any possibility of user error which could have cost more time and impacted the client. The result was a fast, error-free method of bulk-adding devices for clients that could be used again and again.
“We couldn’t do our job without WhatsUp Gold, it is essential to our business," said Maxime. “Not only does it help us save time in supervising all the machines we manage, but we don’t have to wait until we receive an email that service has gone down to work on it.”
For more details on read the Adista case study or check out Maxime’s winning WhatsUp Gold REST API Contest entry here.