With 4NG’s SMARTset, you can manage and control all of your estate from a single interface. Originally conceived to support data centres, the powerful and versatile software has everything you need from an IoT platform, including:
- Agnostic protocols – SMARTset connects to any type of sensor, IoT device or legacy gadget
- Available in the cloud or as an on-premise solution
- Scalable – you can start small and buy more licences and modules as you grow
- Extensible architecture for expansions with OSGi plugins and a GWT style UI API
- Open standards – RDBMS/noSQL, protocols, enterprise integration (LDAP/SAML/AD)
- Open: RESTful API, MQTT, SNMP source
Here, we are going to show you how one of our customers uses SMARTset IoT platform. They access SMARTset from their HQ via the cloud, and can view all of their customers’ sites on a single display, or can drill-down into the information for specific sites or individual devices.
The UPS-monitoring challenge
Our client is a provider of power solutions and they wanted to monitor the uninterrupted power supplies (UPSs) they provide to their customers. The UPSs have network controller cards and software, but are not IoT-ready or equipped for monitoring on an estate-wide basis.
4NG were asked to provide technology that could:
- Allow them to monitor all of their customers’ UPSs from a central HQ (via Internet)
- Connect to UPSs via local networks
- Display estate-wide data on a user-friendly, central IoT platform
- Allow users to drill-down into specific data as needed
- Raise alarms if there are problems with the UPSs
- Generate regular reports on the status of the UPSs.
To meet this challenge, we used our SMARTset software IoT platform, and fitted SMARTstation Pi devices to the UPSs. We use the SMARTstation Pi’s to transform the ‘dumb’ UPSs into ‘smart’ IoT-ready devices.
4NG make dumb devices Smart and deliver an IoT platform
To make the ‘dumb’ UPSs more intelligent, we connected each UPS to a SMARTstation Pi via the local network. The SMARTstation Pi’s turn the UPSs into smart devices by providing processing power, communications access, and a version of SMARTset, 4NG’s monitoring and control software. We also fitted temperature and humidity sensors.
Next, we created a SMARTset instance in the cloud and configured it to:
- Connect to the UPSs via the SMARTstation Pi’s (over the Internet)
- Pull data from the UPSs into corresponding items in the SMARTset database
- Display the UPS data on user customised dashboards
- Raise alarms if it detects alarm conditions on the UPSs. The alarms are raised in SMARTset and can also trigger an alarm email or SMS report, or be sent to an external system
- Generate regular reports of the UPSs’ status. The reports are generated as PDFs, but can also be set to Excel, CSV etc.
SMARTstation PI’s are connected to customer UPS sites and these connect to SMARTset in the cloud which is then accessed by HQ
Result
Thanks to 4NG technology, our client now has the capability to monitor the UPSs it provides to its customers, all from a single display (dashboard). They can choose to show information about all of their UPS customers on a single dashboard, or they can have dashboards for smaller groups or individual customers. This is a great way to benchmark different, but similar sites, so that similar setups can be compared side-by-side and/or league tables.
But it’s not restricted to estate-wide data – our customers can drill down into the data for individual UPSs too. And as SMARTset is in the cloud, they can access the data from anywhere with an Internet connection, via smartphone, tablet, or desktop.
They also have the ability to raise alarms and generate reports based on the status of the UPSs, and can provide customers with a local view of their UPS data.