Global Eyewear Manufacturer

A leading eyewear manufacturer operates a portfolio of six retail brands with approximately 3,800 store locations across North America. Each store depends on reliable network connectivity to support critical business functions such as point-of-sale transactions, inventory management, customer service applications and communications.

To ensure connectivity, every location is equipped with two WAN connections:

• Primary circuit: Wired broadband connection
• Secondary circuit: Cellular backup connection

While this architecture provided redundancy, the organisation lacked comprehensive visibility into the health and availability of both circuits across its retail estate.

The customer’s network operations team needed a scalable solution to monitor the availability and performance of both WAN circuits across thousands of locations.

Prior to this project, visibility was primarily dependent on its incumbent WAN, LAN and Wi-Fi solution. While this was useful for basic network operations, expanding monitoring capabilities through additional licensing and add-on tools would have introduced significant costs.

Several challenges remained:

• Limited visibility into the operational status of both WAN circuits
• Difficulty identifying backup circuit failures before they became business-impacting events
• Lack of centralised reporting across all retail brands and locations
• Inability to proactively monitor latency and packet loss across cellular connections
• A need to validate that ongoing telecommunications expenditure was delivering functioning primary and backup services

The most significant risk was that stores could unknowingly lose their backup cellular connection while continuing to operate normally on the primary circuit. The issue would only become apparent if the primary connection subsequently failed, leaving the store without network connectivity or an available failover path.

To address these challenges, our team implemented a SolarWinds Hybrid Monitoring solution, leveraging both Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and Server & Application Monitor (SAM).

The solution was designed to provide comprehensive visibility into network availability and circuit performance, while scaling to support thousands of geographically distributed retail locations.

Hybrid Data Collection Architecture
The monitoring strategy combined traditional network polling with API-driven data collection.

SNMP Monitoring and API-Based Performance Monitoring
Using SolarWinds NPM and API-based performance monitoring to complement SNMP, the solution leveraged SNMP polling against the security appliances installed at each retail location.

This enabled monitoring of:

• Device availability
• WAN interface status
• Circuit up/down conditions
• Historical availability trends
• Circuit latency
• Packet loss
• Connectivity health indicators

Approximately 3,800 network nodes and more than 7,600 WAN interfaces were brought under centralised monitoring.

By combining SNMP and API data with SolarWinds alerting capabilities, operations teams gained the ability to proactively identify network degradation before users experienced business-impacting issues.

Scalable Architecture
As monitoring expanded across thousands of locations, an Additional Polling Engine (APE) was deployed to distribute workloads and reduce processing demands on the primary SolarWinds server infrastructure.

This architecture ensured consistent monitoring performance while supporting the organisation’s growing monitoring requirements.

Automated Alerting and Visibility
Custom dashboards and alerting mechanisms provide operations teams with near real-time visibility into circuit status across the enterprise.

This enables teams to:

• Monitor the health of both primary and backup circuits
• Receive alerts when latency or packet loss thresholds are exceeded
• Identify enterprise-wide outages
• Gain store-level insights into connectivity performance

Network operations teams can immediately determine whether a store has lost a primary or backup connection and take corrective action before business operations are affected.

The project transformed the customer’s ability to manage connectivity across a large, distributed retail environment.

Key outcomes included:

1. Centralised visibility into network availability across 3,800 locations
2. Continuous monitoring of both primary and backup WAN circuits
3. Proactive alerting based on latency and packet loss thresholds
4. Improved resilience through early detection of backup circuit failures
5. Reduced operational risk during primary circuit outages
6. Lower monitoring costs compared with expanding vendor-specific monitoring tools
7. A scalable SolarWinds architecture capable of supporting future growth

By combining SolarWinds NPM, SAM, SNMP polling, API integrations and distributed polling architecture, the organisation established a comprehensive monitoring solution that improved network reliability while helping ensure every store maintained the redundancy required to support business-critical operations.