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Pennsylvania School District Shifts to Remote Learning with Progress WhatsUp Gold

Oct 27, 2020   

Award-winning WhatsUp Gold enables district’s IT team to actively monitor devices that support 2,500 students, faculty and staff, and the 600GB of daily network traffic they generate

BEDFORD, Mass., Oct. 27, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS), the leading provider of application development and digital experience technologies, today announced that the Danville Area School District (DASD), a midsized rural public school district that spans portions of two counties in Pennsylvania, has implemented Progress® WhatsUp® Gold network monitoring to shift seamlessly to a stable environment for remote learning.

Even prior to the global pandemic, maintaining a stable network infrastructure presented unique challenges to IT administrators in education. Now, with school closures sparking a dramatic uptick in the amount of traffic traveling through the network, many IT teams are scrambling. The DASD technology team had weeks to get the Danville Area School District's 2,500 students, staff, and faculty online and fully supported for remote learning in time for the first day of school.

To make the transition to remote learning as smooth as possible, DASD used WhatsUp Gold as its network monitoring solution, as it satisfied three major requirements:

  • Easy implementation, with the IT team able to discover devices and create a network map within hours
  • Detailed statistics and insightful reports into device usage, traffic flow, disk utilization and other critical network benchmarks
  • At-a-glance visibility into the entire network, enabling proactive network monitoring

WhatsUp Gold enables the district’s IT team to actively monitor nearly 100 infrastructure devices, including switches, routers, servers, Wi-Fi access points and more. With at-a-glance network visibility and real-time alerts sent straight to their phones, the IT team is able to fix errors and identify network usage anomalies well before they’re noticed by end-users.

“Our goal has always been to provide a cost-effective yet reliable infrastructure that could sustain business needs while maintaining a thriving learning environment for students,” said Jeff Ryan, Director of Information Technology, Danville Area School District. “We don’t like to be surprised when something goes down. That’s why we love the WhatsUp Gold dashboard. We can customize it with what’s important to us – we get an instant snapshot of our entire network.”

In addition, WhatsUp Gold network monitoring has given the district’s IT team complete confidence they would be able to handle the workload as the district switched to a hybrid learning model. The school district was able to roll out additional Chromebooks to kindergartners, knowing the network could take the additional traffic.

“Even prior to the COVID-19 health crisis, monitoring networks for remote users could be challenging,” said John Ainsworth, SVP, Core Products, Progress. “Today, the stark increase in remote learning means that there has been a sharp rise in traffic traveling through remote-access networks. As more school districts have moved or faced a return to distance learning as a result of the pandemic, we have seen a rise in interest from the education industry. From K-12 schools to universities, WhatsUp Gold can enable IT teams to actively monitor their networks with at-a-glance visibility and real-time alerts.”

Progress WhatsUp Gold network monitoring solution enables small and midsized businesses and enterprises to continuously monitor and manage their IT infrastructure and applications, ensuring high levels of performance and availability. WhatsUp Gold 2020 makes it easier than ever to find and fix problems fast with improvements to usability, scalability, integration and mapping and reporting.

To learn more about how customers use WhatsUp Gold, visit the WhatsUp Gold resource center. You can also register for the webinar, “Learn How Danville Area School District Shifted Seamlessly to Remote Learning with WhatsUp Gold,” on Oct. 28, 2020.

Additional Resources

About Progress
Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) offers the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications. We enable customers and partners to deliver modern, high-impact digital experiences with a fraction of the effort, time and cost. Progress offers powerful tools for easily building adaptive user experiences across any type of device or touchpoint, leading data connectivity technology, web content management, business rules, secure file transfer and network monitoring. Over 1,700 independent software vendors, 100,000 enterprise customers, and two million developers rely on Progress to power their applications. Learn about Progress at www.progress.com or +1-800-477-6473. 

Progress and WhatsUp are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation and/or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the US and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contact:                                                                 
Kim Baker                                                                          
Progress                                                                          
+1 781-280-4000                                                         
pr@progress.com


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Source: Progress Software Corporation