Ipswitch Inc. today announced that its WhatsUp Gold® network and server performance monitoring solution is being used at Roskilde Festival this weekend to ensure optimised performance and continuous availability of all mission critical ICT services for the duration of the event.

One of Europe’s largest culture and music festivals, the annual Roskilde Festival in Denmark attracts an enormous audience of 135,000 festival goers. This year the eight-day event will feature 175 artists, including headline acts like Paul McCartney, Kendrick, Muse, Pharrell Williams, and Florence + The Machine.

Roskilde Festival’s IT team will be using WhatsUp Gold Enterprise to monitor an extended multi-platform network that includes a 10 Km fixed fibre backbone and over 100 wireless hotspots. Multiple private relay LANs deliver site-wide video surveillance and payment services along with dedicated capacity for live streaming by TV and media companies.

“For such a high profile event, maintaining 24/7 continuous network operations using WhatsUp Gold is mission critical,” explains Steen Bechmann Henningsen, IT Manager at Roskilde Kultureservice A/S. “The network infrastructure must be failsafe and stable because everyone – from production teams at the event’s eight stages to the security teams patrolling the camping and car park areas – depends upon the services our network delivers.”

Roskilde Festival is like a huge temporary city. Equating to 350 football fields, the vast 7 Km2 site incorporates food and retail courts, an art zone, a technology and design zone, camp sites, 8 stage areas and more. With an average age of 24, festival goers expect to be able to keep in contact with friends and families, thanks to uninterrupted access to the free public internet service delivered via an extensive wireless network complemented by temporary extra cellphone capacity delivered by the 3 nationwide mobile operators.

The complex and dynamic infrastructure also includes secure networks for stall holders and catering teams which support hundreds of cash registers, order fulfilment and payment terminals across multiple locations.

“We need to be able to monitor every gateway, switch, router, server and application in real-time,” continues Henningsen. “Any form of outage whatsoever impacts on the smooth operations of the event. Just 60 minutes downtime will have a massive impact on audience satisfaction and the event’s brand reputation, and will significantly affect revenue generation capabilities for all concerned.”

Organised by Roskilde Festival Charity Society, all profits from the festival are donated to national and international humanitarian and cultural causes. Since 1971, the festival has generated over €26.4 million for worldwide projects and charities.

“WhatsUp Gold was the perfect solution to our challenge. Fast to set up and implement, its impressively configurable and delivers a global and granular end-to-end overview of the entire estate,” confirms Henningsen.

In the run-up to the festival, which this year takes place 27 June – 4 July, the IT team has been using WhatsUp Gold to monitor its enterprise network which supports 70 employees at locations in Roskilde and about 1,000 volunteers around Denmark. Prior to the event, the network scales to support the 32,000 volunteers involved in assisting with pre-event preparations and on-site operations during the festival – during which the network extends to deliver a full range of festival services to event work teams, commercial partners, festival goers, artists and the press.

“We’ve been able to personalise dashboards, create alerts and fully road test WhatsUp Gold before the festival kicks-off in earnest – and we’re very happy with the results,” says Henningsen. “Thanks to the 24/7 real-time monitoring we’ve been able to proactively troubleshoot issues and as a consequence have significantly reduced support calls from users.”

“Roskilde Festival has to manage some unique challenges. Over eight days its IT infrastructure has to scale massively, coping with huge traffic fluctuations and bandwidth demand,” said Alessandro Porro, VP of International Sales, Ipswitch. “With WhatsUp Gold, the IT team will be able to manage a complex and ever-changing environment with ease, monitoring every asset and network and intervening fast before a problem occurs - essential for a festival event, where waiting until tomorrow isn’t an option.”