Smart Monitoring – IoT solutions from Nobius
m
Smart metering requires smart IT monitoring.
Smart cities, smart buildings, smart meters we hear about them all the time. Let me tell you a few stories and ideas
I remember when Linky was installed at my home, that’s our national electricity boards smart electricity meter.
It created a lot of pushback through FUD articles, but some people did notice extraordinary bills suddenly appearing. it seems these meters measure all the power we consume, including that through different harmonics., which the old meters didn’t. I’ll come back to them later.
Billing ! Now there’s an important aspect of monitoring.
When I was a young engineer, I worked on 
Gas supply metering. Our calculators were the only approved ones in my country for billing. Our company won a project to deliver a methane gas reception port metering system in Korea.
I remember it used a parallel set of metering pipes each working at different flow rates to improve accuracy.
Our electronics used state of the art Intel 8086 CPUs at the time, and we adopted a Hunter and Ready multi-tasking operator and AMD 9511 maths sub processor. All that led to fast execution of highly accurate flow algorithms. The system was electronically clustered with memory duplication and calculator switchover, thus one system monitoring the other to find faults, and then self-heal.
That was back in the eighties, but I’m sure the principle of belt and braces to ensure the bills generated are using accurate measurement and calculation, are just as important today, potentially even more as everything is connected.
That Linky smart meter I mentioned earlier, isn’t backed up by anything yet it’s being used to bill me. So I started to check on its measurements, studying my appliance ratings, and the amount of time they operate.
It was pretty soon clear that my bills had unnecessarily increased. I sought out the customer service to get explanations, you all know how those adventures end up.
I’ve lost confident of their service, but these smart meters are imposed by our government !!
The importance of monitoring.
Did you see my recent blog? It tells a story of a conversation I had with a young developer who claimed monitoring is dead and not needed.
Well given the number of people that use Zabbix for IT Monitoring today, that’s unlikely. I used the above Linky example to explain my disagreement with her.
I’m pretty open and I agree she does have a point, but its more accurate to say monitoring needs to evolve not that it isn’t needed.
We can’t expect to support modern microservices and cloud apps in the same old ways.
Nobius to the rescue
Methods such as IoT to collect data from sensors and connected devices, is just one evolution that Zabbix has embraced. So now the power of Zabbix can be used to capture and test the data coming from these devices.
If you look at the agenda of the Zabbix summit, you can see numerous sessions by several 3rd parties that describe how this can be done.
At #Nobius we know this is a breakthrough and a real differentiator for Zabbix to have such native support for MQTT and modbus as it’s an off the shelf AND FREE IT Monitoring solution.
In fact Nobius was a silver sponsor of this event, and as such UK attendees can qualify for a 25% discount on our services.
Is your IT monitoring up to scratch and accurate?
#Nobius will help you to implement IT Monitoring and #IoT using Zabbix and to evolve whatever solutions you’re using today.
As we recommend Zabbix, we’ll reduce your IT Monitoring costs too.
See our video http://pos.li/2gobqs and website, and reach out to #Nobius at info@nobius.co.uk,
And by the way, that electricity supplier has now publicly admitted that batch of smart meters are essentially faulty. Maybe they need better monitoring.
Recent Comments