Haga Hospital Prioritizes Business-Critical Network Traffic Deploying Progress Flowmon

When three of the largest hospitals merged in 2004, Haga Hospital opened in the city of The Hague, Netherlands.

Large is also an appropriate description of Haga’s IT and network infrastructure. After undergoing a new, multi-year installation, Haga was equipped with the ability to connect its 3,000 plus employees, patients and visitors to the Internet. Administrators wanted to provide the best Internet service possible for both work and leisure, however the infrastructure was also complex. It ran on several crucial business applications and systems. For example, within any of Haga’s physical networks, over 20 VPNs were accessible.

For Walter Telting, ICT Architect at Haga Hospital, these complications made it difficult to locate potential network traffic problems. The hospital required many of these applications to be continuously running. His team was unable to pinpoint and solve any network problems, too.

“Our challenge was not only to identify and stop unwanted traffic, but also to gain insight of the actual network usage,” said Telting. “It is very important for us to know what bandwidth is required by an application when you encounter certain peaks.”

Seeing an opportunity to improve their own infrastructure, the IT team chose to deploy Progress® Flowmon® to monitor and analyze traffic from various sources across the hospital’s three locations. Those included Haga’s data center, Internet, DMZ and enterprise networks.

The IT department then began using one of Flowmon’s core capabilities – built-in reporting and alerting – to full effect, later adding automation to the process. Lastly, the IT team installed a new analysis system. This helped to create personalized profiles of each connected device such that the individual profiles would be notified when abnormal traffic occurred, and the IT team could immediately begin work to resolve the issue.

The End Result

Telting and his team have taken advantage of their new network monitoring capabilities, specifically for helping to prioritize certain types of network traffic, pinpoint crucial issues and ignore the rest

“Thanks to the Flowmon solution, we have a clear overview and can act immediately. For example, we prioritize a specific network traffic, thereby we give priority to the business-critical network traffic from the hospital.”

Walter Telting,
ICT Architect, Haga Hospital

On a big-picture level, Haga’s IT team received a much greater view into not only the hospital’s network, but its traffic as well. Now, any network or data traffic problems, such as outages or slowdowns, that pop up for a patient or doctor can be solved effectively and swiftly.

About Haga Hospital

The Haga Hospital is the leading top clinical teaching hospital in the Haaglanden region with 23 medical specialist courses, 14 of which are primary specialisms. The Haga Hospital offers excellent basic care and distinctive top clinical functions such as the Cardiovascular Center and pediatric medicine in the Juliana Children’s Hospital. In addition, the hospital houses one of the most visited emergency rooms in the Netherlands. To learn more visit https://www.hagaziekenhuis.nl