It’s the two minutes everyone waits for, but for the IT team at Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Derby is a 24-hour marathon of extreme demand variability. The venue recently announced a massive network refresh, designating Cisco as their official partner to deploy over 7,000 switches across 26 properties. Their goal? To move from disparate, fragmented networks to a unified, AI-ready infrastructure capable of handling the surge of 170,000 fans without collapsing.
While most of us don’t manage infrastructure for the “Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports,” the pain points Churchill Downs faced are painfully familiar. They needed to know exactly what was on their network, how it was connected, and where the bottlenecks were—before the users started screaming.
But here is the reality for most IT departments and MSPs: You aren’t operating on a brand new, AI-ready Cisco fabric. You are managing a legacy environment that grew organically, cobbled together with different switch vendors, aging firewalls, and documentation that hasn't been updated since the last sysadmin left three years ago.
The Problem: Flying Blind with Static Diagrams
When Churchill Downs talks about transitioning from a “collection of disparate networks,” they are describing the exact state of most managed service providers (MSPs) and internal IT departments. You have a stack of tools—maybe an RMM for endpoints, a separate helpdesk, and a standalone NMS tool that no one looks at because it’s too noisy.
The core issue is Network Visibility, or the lack thereof.
Most IT teams rely on static Visio diagrams or quarterly network audits to understand their topology. By the time that audit is finished, it’s already out of date. A technician plugs a rogue switch into a port in the conference room, a new printer goes live in accounting, and a link aggregation fails in the server closet. Your map says everything is fine, but reality says otherwise.
The Impact on Operations:
- Alert Storms & Noise: A switch goes down. Instead of one alert, you get fifty alerts because every downstream device (printer, AP, workstation) suddenly goes unreachable. You waste 20 minutes correlating the data to find the root cause.
- SLA Misses: If a user reports the Wi-Fi is down, and you have to log into five different switches to trace the physical path, you have already lost the race against your SLA.
- Security Gaps: You can’t protect what you can’t see. Unmanaged endpoints appearing on the network often fly under the radar until they cause a conflict or a breach.
Traditional RMM platforms are great for managing the agent—the Windows server or the workstation—but they are notoriously bad at seeing the wires. They don't map the relationships between the switch, the router, and the endpoint. That blind spot is where downtime lives.
How AlertMonitor Solves This
At AlertMonitor, we believe you shouldn't need a multi-million dollar hardware refresh to get enterprise-grade visibility. While Churchill Downs upgraded their physical infrastructure, we upgrade your operational visibility by unifying monitoring, RMM, and network topology into a single pane of glass.
AlertMonitor continuously discovers and maps every device on your network—switches, firewalls, access points, printers, IP cameras, and unmanaged endpoints. We use standard protocols like SNMP, ARP, and active scanning to build a Live Topology Map that reflects the real world right now, not three months ago.
Here is how this changes the workflow:
- Contextual Alerting: When a link drops or a switch goes offline, AlertMonitor doesn’t just spam you with errors. It fires a single, intelligent alert identifying the root cause device. It tells you exactly which downstream endpoints are affected. You go from “The internet is down everywhere” to “Switch Core-01 Port 24 is down, affecting 12 users in Finance.”
- Auto-Discovery: No more manual documentation. When a new device appears on the network, AlertMonitor spots it, classifies it, and adds it to the map. If it’s an unauthorized device, you can flag it immediately.
- Unified Dashboard: You don't need to toggle between your NMS and your RMM. The network status sits right alongside your ticket queue and patch status.
Practical Steps: Moving from Reactive to Proactive
You can start reclaiming your network visibility today without ripping out your existing switches. Here is a practical roadmap to get started:
1. Enable SNMP on Your Infrastructure
You can't manage what you can't monitor. Ensure SNMP (v2c or v3) is enabled on your switches, routers, and firewalls. Create a read-only community string that your monitoring platform can use to query device state and neighbor tables.
2. Validate Reachability with a Simple Scan
Before relying on a tool, verify your baseline. Use a simple PowerShell script to sweep your known critical subnets. This helps identify devices that might be blocking ICMP or have incorrect IP configurations.
# Simple Network Reachability Check
$subnet = "192.168.1."
1..254 | ForEach-Object {
$ip = $subnet + $_
if (Test-Connection -ComputerName $ip -Count 1 -Quiet -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) {
Write-Host "$ip is Online" -ForegroundColor Green
}
}
3. Audit Your Switch Interfaces for Status
If you have access to a Linux server or a Bash shell, you can use a tool like snmpwalk (part of net-snmp) to query interface status on your switches. This is the foundation of automated topology mapping.
# Check interface status on a switch (requires snmpwalk and community string)
# Replace 'public' with your SNMP community string and '192.168.1.1' with your switch IP
snmpwalk -v 2c -c public 192.168.1.1 1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.8
# Returns 1 for up, 2 for down, etc.
4. Deploy Unified Monitoring
Stop relying on scripts and manual checks. Deploy AlertMonitor to ingest this SNMP data automatically. By correlating the link state with your endpoint monitoring, you transform a chaotic mess of alerts into a clear, actionable priority list.
Churchill Downs is building a unified network to handle the Derby. You need a unified view to handle your Monday morning. Ditch the static Visio files and start seeing your network for what it really is: a living, breathing entity that needs constant attention.
Related Resources
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