FSV Mainz05, an established Bundesliga club, is a modern football team that relies on cutting-edge technology to keep its stadium operations running smoothly. Karsten Lippert, Head of ICT and Digitalisation at FSV Mainz05, tells us how his team uses IT monitoring to ensure seamless game-day operations, from ticketing and security to video analysis and fan engagement.
Founded in 1905, FSV Mainz05 currently has 1,100 employees and more than 20,000 members. The professional soccer team has been a fixture in Germany’s Bundesliga for the past 20 years.
Since 2011, the club has been playing its home games in the Mewa Arena, a modern football stadium that is also used for major events. Even a ‘normal’ company of this size needs an extensive IT team. A modern professional football club has special needs that require even more technology, personnel and expertise.
Karsten Lippert, Head of ICT and Digitalisation at Mainz05, is in charge of the club’s stadium technology and IT. His title alone is a sign that digitalisation has become a part of everyday life in the world of professional football. In short, a game would not even be possible today without properly functioning IT. IT controls and monitors just about everything at the stadium, from advance ticket sales to admission at the gates, video analysis systems for halftime talks in locker rooms, cash registers at bratwurst stands, floodlights, Wi-Fi and the club’s radio.
Lippert and his team are, of course, also responsible for the traditional IT environment, i.e., the network and the infrastructure with its devices, applications, VMware and storage systems.
The requirement: A comprehensive monitoring system
In Germany, professional football clubs work with the German Football League (DFL), which imposes extremely strict regulations on the operations at stadiums. The first requirements take effect four days before the day of a game. In total, the DFL requires Mainz05 to successfully complete around 100 checks. These include the ISMA network for providing video analysts with camera feeds, the turnstiles for controlling access to the stadium and the telephones used on the day of the game.
After a game, the systems required for the game are switched off and the stadium runs in ‘normal’ operation mode. To meet these specific requirements, the IT team set up two separate systems: the game operations system and the ‘normal’ IT. The traditional IT systems must also be available at all times, especially on the day of – and the days leading up to – a game. Without reliable and comprehensive monitoring, the IT team at Mainz05 would be putting the club’s entire operations at risk.
Originally, the team used three different systems but the IT team at Mainz05 found it extremely difficult to integrate these systems with each other. The club therefore needed a system that could incorporate the IT network and infrastructure – as well as the entire stadium technology – to immediately identify and resolve issues.
Planning and design
Lippert had already worked with Paessler PRTG Network Monitor during a previous job, and was confident the tool would meet all the club’s needs. Mainz05 uses systems from the manufacturer Kentix. Paessler and Kentix have been partners for many years, and Kentix sensors and systems can be easily integrated into PRTG.
In addition, the club was impressed that Paessler – a company from Germany – was the creator of the tool. In 2020, a regional service provider helped the Mainz05 IT team implement PRTG. During the implementation, the goal was to make the football club’s employees familiar with the tool, such that the use of the centralised monitoring system could be expanded in future.
Lippert explains: “From the outset, our objective was to become proficient in PRTG so we could maintain and develop our monitoring environment autonomously. Our service provider trained our employees on the ins-and-outs of our solution during the implementation of the tool. In no time at all, we were able to develop our own dashboards and extensions for PRTG. This wouldn’t have been possible without the outstanding usability of the monitoring tool.”
Lippert added the importance of comprehensive monitoring for his role as Head of ICT and Digitalisation: “With digitalisation, IT is increasingly becoming the basis for components and departments that were previously analogue. For us as an IT team, this means more and more responsibility. To best fulfil our role, we must always be informed of the status and performance of all IT and stadium technology, and be promptly notified in the event of disruptions – not only about the type, but also the cause and location. Such notifications are only possible if digitalised environments and IT are monitored with a single monitoring system, and if this system is able to maintain a comprehensive overview. This is exactly what we get with PRTG.”
IT Monitoring: The basis
A traditional IT environment composed of servers, databases, storage systems, firewalls, switches, backup systems, Wi-Fi access points, cloud services and many other IT components – all of which are integrated into the centralised PRTG monitoring environment – serves as the basis for Mainz05’s stadium technology and everyday operational procedures.
Many of these components have been integrated into PRTG automatically via SNMP. For others, such as Fortigate firewalls or the Veeam backup system, Lippert and his team use PowerShell scripts to query data via the device application programming interface (API).
Mainz05 uses Büro+ from Microtech as its ERP solution. Büro+ generates an XML file that is read via a PowerShell script and integrated into PRTG. With this tool, the team can keep a constant eye on the number of users and the cash flow in the inventory management system.
But monitoring with PRTG doesn’t stop there: servers, services, the internal databases of the ERP system and the use of licenses. If a service fails, PRTG restarts it automatically. As a result, many IT problems are resolved immediately – without Lippert and his team having to intervene.
The Mainz05 website is one of the club’s most important communication tools for fans and the press. Lippert and his team use PRTG remote probes in various subnets to monitor load times from different perspectives and therefore optimise performance for all users.
PRTG remote probes are polling engines that use queries (sensors) to collect monitoring data via common protocols, before sending this data to the main PRTG instance (with TSL encryption) for evaluation. With remote probes, multiple locations can be monitored by a single instance of PRTG. Among other things, they can also be used (as in the current example) to monitor website load times from different perspectives.
Lippert said: “Of course, a monitoring tool with a high degree of automation is extremely beneficial. On the other hand, this can also be extremely limiting as the creative solutions (which are always needed in practice) are often difficult to implement. PRTG offers the perfect compromise here: the software comes with numerous predefined sensors and features that function out of the box, which makes our day-to-day work much easier. In addition, its custom sensor templates and API allow us to easily integrate our own scripts to meet our own individual needs.”
