Guide to Monitoring Remote Equipment

When you have a network that's spread out across a large geographic area, you obviously also have a lot of remote equipment that must be monitored and managed. All sorts of threats come in to play when you don't have someone permanently staffed at a remote site, including high temperature, humidity, flooding, intrusion, theft (especially copper theft), and vandalism.

Do you realize that a large chunk of your company's potential profit is eaten away by the inefficient execution of maintenance tasks and your inability to provide reliable service to your customers? If you don't have a good remote equipment monitoring system in place, your technicians can't help but do "the best they can" to keep your network operating in good order. If you don't have a good remote equipment monitoring system in place, your customers are far more likely to abandon you after experiencing several frustrating service outages.

Obviously, you can't pay someone simply the city to your remote sites all day, but you can gain many of the advantages of a human presence by deploying a remote equipment monitoring system. In fact, an automated system is frequently superior to a human because it doesn't get tired, miss details, or have ill intent.

In this diagram, T/Mon monitors remote equipment alarms from DPS Telecom remotes, many other brands of remotes, and SNMP, TL1, & ASCII devices.

Let's now take a look at the basics of remote equipment monitoring. No matter what the scale of your network or how many sites you have, remote equipment monitoring starts with a Remote Telemetry Unit ("RTU" or "alarm remote") stationed at each of your sites. An RTU doesn't need to be a large device. In fact, some of the best RTU's on the market are just one rack unit high. The effect of an alarm remote, however, is huge.

A good alarm remote is a tireless guardian in your network. It will monitor the temperature (both inside and outside of your site), doors, motion sensors, humidity, and critical equipment alarms. Good monitoring of these and similar factors gives you an edge in trying to keep your network online as much as possible.

Your RTU will, however, respond to the size of your network in a way that it sends you alerts. If you're a large company with a large network, you probably already have a network operations center (NOC) in place with 24 hour a day staffing. With this resource available, your best solution will be to route alarms from your alarm remote to a central master station console located at your NOC. This provides a central aggregation point for all alarms that is necessary to keep a large network and its multiple technicians coordinated to handle maintenance and emergency repairs.

If you don't have a NOC at your company (or even one that's just not staffed 24 hours a day), your RTU should also be capable of sending alarms to you directly via e-mail, cell phone text message, or phone voice message. You should also be able to set alert schedules for alarms. During normal business hours, you may want to know every alarm related to your remote equipment. In the middle of the night, however, it's very likely that you'll only want to be disturbed for major or critical alarms. Good RTU's allow you to make this distinction based on the time of day and the day of week.

Any RTU that you select should support both central console modifications and e-mail/phone notifications. Having both of these capabilities in a single remote adds important flexibility to your remote equipment monitoring system. You'll be able to transition between notification methods on your company grows, or add e-mail and phone notifications to complement what your 7x24 NOC is capable of dispatching.

You do, however, need to select RTU's that have an appropriate capacity for the amount of alarms you have present at each site. You want to allow for some growth, but there's no sense in buying more capacity than you're ever going to use.

Fortunately, a good remote equipment monitoring manufacturer will have a variety alarm remotes available to support a variety of capacities at your remote sites. For example, DPS Telecom has a range of alarm remotes that contain two, four, eight, 16, 20, 32, 64, and 176 discrete alarm points. This allows for good flexibility when selecting alarm remotes.

When it comes time for your real-world deployment, you reduce the cost and confusion of installation (and a lot of headaches for you later) by standardizing on just a few different alarm remote model for a few different site sizes. If you divide your sites into large, medium, and small sites based on the amount of remote equipment contained in each, you can select three different alarm remotes that cover this range well. Selecting just one or two remotes can often result in too little capacity at some sites and way too much at other sites. Selecting more than three can make it difficult for your technicians to learn and install so many different units.

You also need to be careful that you choose a monitoring equipment manufacturer that can support the transport available at your remote sites. Depending on your industry and the construction of your network, you may or may not have a LAN available at all sites. Some sites might be fed with a T1 while others might only have a fiber connection. If this is the case, you should choose alarm remote that has a built-in T1 or fiber connection.

As an example, the NetGuardian 216F has a pair of 1000BaseFX SFP fiber connections that allow it to connect to a fiber ring. It will also break out 10/100 LAN for the other devices at your site. This NetGuardian, which acts as both a monitoring device and provides LAN to your external equipment, is often much less expensive than purchasing a LAN card from your fiber transport manufacturer - while still providing more functionality.

The NetGuardian 216T is closely related to the 216F, except it has a T1 connection instead of a fiber connection. Both PPP and FrameRelay protocols are supported on the T1 connection. To add flexibility during your future LAN rollouts, the NetGuardian 216T can also report alarms back to you via LAN. When your LAN rollout reaches the site containing the 216T, you can simply unplug the T1 and connect it to standard 10/100 LAN.

A Story of Monitoring Remote Equipment at Hundreds of Sites
Recently, a DPS client named Sam contacted DPS. He was working with one of his long-time customers to outline a solution for the monitoring of their remote equipment. Most of the equipment was expected to support SNMP. Due to the quantity of potential alarms/traps that could be raised, Sam needed to have an on-site intelligent unit to filter out all but the most important items.

Sam asked whether the DPS product line was usable in this project. The answer, of course, was yes. The quantity of units required for the project would fall somewhere with the wide range from 100 to 1100 depending on the cost and engineering time required.

The following design considerations were included when developing this project specification:

1. Low installation costs / complexity
2. Relatively low purchase costs
3. Single standard monitoring setup for both LAN and dialup sites
4. Easy to use engineer displays (laptop based)
5. Support for remote control functions
6. Maintain full Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery capability
7. Minimize additional support
8. Straightforward configuration
9. Standards based where possible
10. LAN interface (two preferable to allow segmentation)
11. USB interface for local printer or external HDD to log data
12. Serial interfaces for data collection (at least two preferred)
13. Ability to easily load and manage SNMP MIB files
14. Configurable SNMP manager functions (eg polling rate etc)
15. Poll up to 253 SNMP devices
16. Support at least 32 standard MIBs plus MIB extensions within a single RTU
17. Local and distributed I/O (ethernet based)
18. LAN/PSTN/ISDN/GSM/GPRS communications support with option for both GSM and PSTN modems within the same RTU
19. Option to Integrate existing Seprol S1000/S500 devices
20. Fully remote configurable
21. Web interface for management
22. At least 10 years manufacturer support
23. Physical attributes include rack mounting, 8 hour battery backup, flexible I/O termination options
24. Local event log that is filterable and viewable through the web interface and with a download option. Extendable log capacity using USB hard drive desirable.
25. Integral Man Safety system
26. Several options for uplink protocol including DNP3
27. Appropriate security controls

There was an urgent need for a fast proposal, so the DPS Sales team consulted engineering and developed a custom application drawing for Sam to review.

For this type of project, a variety of alarm remotes are useful for monitoring remote equipment. With about 500 sites requiring monitoring, standardization on about 3 RTU models is highly recommended. The only exception would be at very systematic networks where all sites are exceedingly similar or identical. If any sites have varying quantities of remote equipment to be monitored, multiple RTU's should be deployed to avoid have too little or too much capacity.

Related Topics:
Additional Info: Equipment Monitoring

Introduction to Remote Monitoring Tools

Related Remote Equipment Monitoring Devices:
Central Master: T/Mon
Alarm Remote: The NetGuardian 832A G5

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NetGuardian 832A G5

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NetGuardian 832A

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NetGuardian LT

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NetGuardian LT