WHATSUP KEEPS LEGOLAND

TURNSTYLES RINGING

Company Background

Merlin Entertainments is the biggest attractions operator in Europe and currently operates 37 attractions in ten

European countries, plus a theme park in California; continually expanding its estate and growing profit year on

year. Merlin Entertainments owns some of the biggest leisure brands including the famous London Dungeons,

Legoland in Windsor, Gardaland in Italy and the 33 Sea Life centres dotted around the UK.

Customer Issue

Group Security and Infrastructure Manager, Paul Sylvester and his team of five are responsible for monitoring

the needs of the company's 5,000 employees across some 96 servers spread out throughout the globe in

locations such as the UK, Germany, Spain, Netherlands and the US. Additionally to this, there is local IT admin-

istration staff at the majority of its 38 sites.

After looking at numerous network monitoring solutions on the market, Sylvester was far from impressed with

the products on offer, until he was recommended Ipswitch WhatsUp

by an ISP. Merlin Entertainments pur-

chased five copies to cover all its main sites. "We have a large 28 inch flat screen monitor that shows the

WhatsUp graphical map view 24/7, so that we can instantly see if any of our devices go down," said Sylvester

The Solution

As well as monitoring Merlin Entertainments' 96 servers, WhatsUp is linked into Legoland's new IP connected

turnstiles where visitors scan in tickets they bought online beforehand. This means that they can react the

moment a turnstile goes down. "Thanks to WhatsUp we can be pro-active and fix a problem almost immediate-

ly, thus ensuring that the queues don't get too long and the public

can get into the park quickly and easily," explained Sylvester.

Merlin Entertainments has found Ipswitch WhatsUp to be the perfect

solution for its needs. "WhatsUp tells us exactly where the problem

exists and can automatically contact the relevant engineer on site

who can quickly and easily rectify the problem before staff or cus-

tomers are affected," enthuses Sylvester.

Ipswitch WhatsUp can send alerts via email, pager, mobile phone,

SMS or audio alerts, plus System task tray alerts; forward SNMP

traps; and restart business-critical application services. Sylvester

has configured the software to alert him if the problem is on one of

the company-side servers and the local engineer if is at one of the

parks.

"We must have saved thousands of pounds since implementing

Ipswitch WhatsUp," enthused Sylvester. "Before installing Ipswitch

WhatsUp, it took us three days to find and fix a problem at the

Case study

10 Maguire Road

Lexington, MA 02421

(781) 676-5700

Zekeringstraat 17

1014 BM Amsterdam

The Netherlands

WhatsUp is extremely simple

to use, very reliable and has

become essential to our

day-to-day infrastructure

management. I would highly

recommend it.

-Paul Sylvester  

Group Security and

Infrastructure Manager

Added Value