Case Study: Austin Independent School District achieves faster outage detection and city-wide fiber protection with Progress WhatsUp Gold

School District Protects City-wide Fiber Network with WhatsUp Gold

Austin Independent School District (AISD), which serves about 86,000 students across 125 schools and relies on a 300-mile municipal GAATN fiber network, needed a more practical way to monitor and protect its city-wide infrastructure. A prior high-end management system proved costly, produced constant false positives with only layer‑3 visibility, demanded full‑time attention, and couldn’t reliably distinguish fiber failures from device or link issues — so the district sought a simpler, more effective solution.

WhatsUp Gold replaced that unwieldy system, providing automated alerts, detailed layer‑1 and layer‑2 discovery, and clear graphical views that let staff quickly pinpoint outages (for example, identifying which side of a 114‑strand fiber was cut during a maintenance error). The result: faster isolation and repair of circuit and equipment failures, proactive notifications without continuous monitoring, and flexible dashboards for both management and network teams.

Austin Independent School District

John Kohlmorgan

Director, Network Services