Alarm Point Monitoring

We just landed a new telecom customer last week.  It is always exciting getting new customers.  This one is interesting because of the business drivers behind the purchase.  The key driver was on alarm point monitoring.  What is alarm point monitoring you might ask?  It is the way that service providers monitor things like:

-    Telecom/transport equipment:  switches, SONET gear, fiber optic equipment, microwave radios, etc.

-    Power supplies:  commercial AC power, battery plants, rectifiers, backup generators, UPS systems, etc.

-    Building and facility alarms:  intrusion, entry, open door, fire smoke, flooding, etc.

-    Environmental Conditions:  temperature, humidity, etc.

I find this to be an interesting topic for a variety of reasons.  The first is the fact that many service providers are still not doing this.  A friend of mine works for a large carrier who found out they had an outage after their customer informed them of the issue.  Not good.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was a power outage that went undetected.  That caused a generator to run – also undetected.  Eventually the generator ran out of gas.  Voila!  Ticked off customer.

The thing I find most interesting about this is the amount of egg you get on your face when this happens.  We are not talking about a little blue Robin egg.  We are talking about a nice big Ostrich egg.  This is one of the things your customers quite literally assume that you are doing.  Most wouldn’t think to ask because most consider this an obligatory function of being in the business in the first place.

Power outages are the most common causes of remote site failures.  Monitoring your generators is key.  You should really be monitoring whether your regular self-start tests are running per their schedule.

Another key issue in this space revolves around those unmanned, pesky remote sites.  These facilities (equipment shacks) are often in remote, isolated areas.  Your organization packs them with expensive equipment.  This makes them a key target for thieves and vandals.  Building, facility and surveillance monitoring is another key area for leveraging alarm point monitoring.  This includes things like doors opening, fire alarms, etc.  Tying in building access systems can also provide key peace of mind.

A last key area for alarm point monitoring is the monitoring of environmental conditions.  This typically revolves around measurements such as temperature and humidity which wreak havoc on electronic equipment.  How do you control things like temp and humidity?  HVAC systems.  Another great measurement point.

This is often accomplished by deploying RTU’s (remote terminal units) that take in information via various alarm points – contact closures, analog inputs, and protocol inputs.

In the case of the new customer that I spoke about earlier, they purchased Monolith to receive TL1 alarm feeds from the RTU’s to allow their NOC to have a single, consolidated view (see image below) for receiving and viewing these key surveillance events.  They will also leverage intelligent escalation and notification logic to ensure the right person is notified in a timely fashion if they are not in front of the event console.

One of the big benefits of a system like Monolith’s Event Manager is the ability to utilize our rules engine to make cryptic events – like the 2^nd one from the bottom – and make them extremely easy for NOC Operators to read and understand (e.g. all the other events in the below screen shot).

Don’t get egg on your face!  Make sure to leverage this important, reputation saving technology.

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network management, network monitoring, alarm point monitoring, application monitoring, telco monitoring, SONET, service providers, monolith event manager, NOC Operations, NOC monitoring, network operations center