May 29, 2023
"SolarWinds provides a dependable system showing all our network services, firewalls, routers, primary servers, critical applications, and remote cloud systems in one seamless platform. That’s very critical to our success." — Troy Allen Harry Reid International Airport, Network Administrator
ABOUT HARRY REID INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Based at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas, Nevada, the Department of Aviation staff manages three locations: LAS—previously known as McCarran International Airport—and the North Las Vegas and Henderson executive airports.
The IT team of six engineers is responsible for maintaining the products, services, wireless networks, parking administration, security, and all passenger services at the three locations. Their main goal is to ensure everything at the airports runs smoothly for passengers leaving or arriving at the locations.
CHALLENGE
The three Nevada locations are common-use airports. Any airline can utilize any gate, ticket counter, baggage handling system, or baggage drop-off, unlike many commercial airports where airlines (such as United Airlines® , American Airlines® , and Delta Airlines® ) have their proprietary systems they maintain and manage. At the three Nevada locations, the common-use systems are managed and maintained by the LAS IT team. Though this enables far more flexibility, managing all systems across three major airports with over 100 million passengers passing through each year is a challenging feat.
In addition, the airports’ networks are annual hacking targets. Though hacking is always a concern, Troy Allen, network administrator, chuckles and says, “I get tested every year [when the Black Hat convention comes to town]. High-spirited and willing individuals are flying in from around the world internationally, locally, domestically, you name it. They’re flying in, testing the Wi-Fi, testing the network, and trying to find any open ports or any scans they can.”
The IT team had relied on SolarWinds for over a decade. Still, when SolarWinds was affected by the SUNBURST hack in late 2020, the airports’ cybersecurity team shut down the SolarWinds deployment. Allen says the team spent two years searching for a replacement for SolarWinds capable of providing the depth of visibility and coverage with the ease of use SolarWinds gives its customers.
"I was going through the process of trying different applications, services, and monitoring software. Everything we looked at took up too much of my time and was more intensive. " — Troy Allen Harry Reid International Airport, Network Administrator
“I am not attuned to... the API and script programming [some tools require],” but even if he was, Allen says, “it takes 20 – 30 minutes to write that script or API callout, collect the data, then analyze the data, and you have to repeat that. SolarWinds just made it very simple and easy for us to use straight out of the box.”
SOLUTION
Allen and his team opted to return to SolarWinds, finding it the only multi-platform solution with historical performance monitoring and recall, specialization for alerting, and ease of use for engineers with no dedicated personnel needed. In addition, the team noted the time the company took to create the SolarWinds Secure by Design framework, renewing their confidence in SolarWinds. Allen notes, “We kept updated with all of the changes and all of the upgrades and everything else going on and worked with their cybersecurity team to do the reinstall.”
The team uses many solutions and loves that with SolarWinds, the solutions report data accurately. “With SolarWinds, out of the box, once again, I can see everything from my Cisco and Palo Alto Networks devices and Extreme Management Center (XMC) to my Edge course and KPIs... just about any switch I’ve come across has been able to report correctly on SolarWinds,” Allen says. For instance, LAS utilizes an internet service provider (ISP) vendor and experienced a 2.5-month outage. Though the vendor claimed it was up and running, Allen could prove no data was coming through the port with SolarWinds and received a refund due to the error.
With SolarWinds, Allen’s team can work far more efficiently, saving time and money. Perhaps most importantly, they “have a dependable monitoring system.”
Allen states, “With our security systems, we have a dedicated cybersecurity team on site mostly because of the Black Hat convention and infrastructure and a lot of upgrades to our security infrastructure.” He continues, “We utilize SolarWinds to look for any performance anomalies during specific time frames. As an example, we can start to look at utilization side traffic in various locations— whether Northwest, East, or West—allowing us to stay ahead of any spikes in trends or metrics we can identify through our analytics as being an anomaly. Then, we can start to investigate.”
Overall, SolarWinds allows Allen’s team to mitigate issues before their users experience their effects. “We probably get 30 tickets a month,” he says. “[With SolarWinds], we have a lot [of tickets] which we are not constantly chasing... Instead, you can identify those problems before your users do. We are trying to pursue them instead of being reactive. Now, we are able to proactively solve anywhere from 15 – 20 different issues a day.”
In conclusion, Allen states:
SolarWinds provides a dependable system showing all of our network services, firewalls, routers, primary servers, critical applications, and remote cloud systems in one platform. That’s very critical to our success.
Location: Las Vegas, Nevada
Product Mix
- SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor
- SolarWinds IP Address Manager
- SolarWinds Engineer’s Toolset
