Keeping Digitalisation Under Control
- Using IoT To Monitor A Building

hands using a computer laptop By Martin Hodgson, Regional Sales Manager Northern Europe at Paessler AG.

Digitalisation has arrived. What once promised fabulous possibilities a few years ago has now become mainstream as the IoT is now a reality in most areas. This has created a significant shift when it comes to processing data and monitoring IT infrastructure, buildings and work environments. In this article, Martin Hodgson discusses how Facilities Managers can monitor both the IT components and areas as well as digitised systems and environments. Whether in hospitals, production environments, logistics or building services, devices and systems that were previously analogue and isolated from the IT world are now generating data digitally everywhere, enabling a whole new level of communication. Digitisation enables completely new processes that provide significantly greater efficiency throughout the building and help reduce costs. Only the Facilities Managers suddenly have a lot more to do.

Monitoring Power Supply

Because of the complexity of a building’s infrastructure, monitoring the power supply and the overall environment of building is crucial. For example, when managing a data centre it’s important to understand the condition and status of servers and machines, that all air conditioning units are functioning correctly, the air temperature in the facility, to name just a few metrics. In addition to this, they need to measure certain KPIs. For this, they need a sufficiently complex monitoring tool that is able to bring in data from IIoT sensors, OT systems, and traditional IT components using several common protocols and display everything in one place. Once the tool is set up, the first step is to measure and analyse the power supply and total amount of electricity to the building. In addition, IT and air conditioning should be measured separately. Through these measurements, the efficiency of the cooling in the data centre can be measured.

New Opportunities, New Challenges

With the uptake of every new technology, IT systems are not only vulnerable to threats from the IT world. Besides cyber attacks, “earthly” threats such as wear and tear or environmental parameters can have an enormous impact on systems and equipment. To keep an eye on the obvious hazards, commercial buildings usually have various security systems in place, such as locking systems, fire alarms and surveillance cameras. But what about the dangers that are initially invisible to the human eye?

Even the smallest changes in the ambient air, such as temperature, CO2 concentration or humidity, affect the reliability, performance and service life of IT components. Increased humidity, for example, can cause condensation inside a server. Consequently, short circuits and corrosion are hardly predictable or traceable.

Excessively high temperatures also cause problems for IT components. An increased room temperature is often enough to cause small smouldering fires or short circuits. But that's not all: if the temperature is too high, many processors slow down or servers shut down for security reasons. Once this state is reached, it takes some time for the devices to reach normal temperature again and resume operation.

The availability and function of essential applications, business-relevant processes, access to valuable data and the work of entire departments can thus be jeopardised - a potential nightmare for every company.



Suitable Monitoring Solutions For Digitisation

The basic prerequisite for any comprehensive monitoring solution is mastering the classic monitoring functionality:

  • Collecting data on the availability and performance of devices and systems
  • Storing and analysing the collected data
  • Alerting and notification based on threshold values based on the analysis
  • Publish data and analysis in reports and on dashboards

Countless threats lurk in buildings but by digitalising the infrastructure, Facilities Managers can monitor threats and prevent unexpected surprises. If the building is monitored around the clock, dangers can be detected early and countermeasures can be taken.

Keeping Digitalisation Under Control - Using IoT To Monitor A Building