Remote Site Management with IP/SNMP
Your business relies on equipment that costs many thousands of Euros, yet many of the adverse conditions that cause this equipment to fail remain outside the view of your alarm management system. Many products have the capability to monitor your communications and control equipment and to notify you when indications of problems arise.
MDD SiteBoss Series Overview Matrix
MDD products offer many different options relating to equipment monitoring, including:
Monitor Serial Alarms
Various types of communication, control, and power equipment commonly issue alarm messages via serial port. Many MDD products allow you to set up user-defined “alarm formulas” that define what constitutes a serial alarm message and then send alarm notification back to your Alarm Management System.
Monitor Contact Closures
Many legacy and non-network based devices use contact closures outputs to indicate alarm and system status. Using MDD products you can monitor contact closures inputs from environmental sensors, cameras, power systems, electronic equipment, door and window contacts (for intrusion detection), and many other devices.
Battery/Voltage Monitoring
MDD products allow you to monitor and alarm on analog voltages from +/- 75vdc or 0-5vdc. A common use is to monitor the voltages on battery backup systems, but other devices also output analog voltage levels such as a radio signal strength output. MDD products support both onboard and external analog voltage sensors.
Temperature/Humidity Monitoring
Humidity and temperature can be easily monitored and alarmed on throughout remote equipment rooms and cabinets using MDD products. Both on-board and external sensors are available. We have proprietary sensors which monitor temperature from 32" to 140" and humidity from 20% to 80%, and we also offer a mechanical temperature sensor which can mount on a wall and generate a contact closure when the environment exceeds a preset threshold.
Water/Smoke Detection
Using contact closure inputs you can connect external water sensors and industrial smoke detectors to many MDD products in order to detect water on the floor or smoke in the air of your remote equipment rooms.
Intrusion Detection
Sometimes the missing ingredient in your equipment monitoring includes sensing when doors, windows, or cabinets have been opened. You can monitor when these access points open or close using simple magnetic sensors connected to the contact closure inputs on many MDD products.
Control Output Relays
Output relays are available on some MDD products which are manually controllable or which can be triggered automatically as an alarm action. Output relays allow you to activate sirens, cameras, lights or other electronic devices in remote locations, which often saves the time and expense of going to a remote site.
Custom Scripting for Alarm Interpretation
Sometimes custom scripting is needed to interrogate intelligent serial devices or to evaluate multiple sensor inputs in order to determine if an alarm threshold has been reached. Some MDD products support writing of custom functionality modules to support special applications such as these.
Create a Faux-MIB for Legacy Devices
Custom scripting can also be used to write an SNMP proxy front-end for legacy equipment so that the alarm and status values of that legacy equipment can be read and written using standard SNMP via a faux-MIB within the MDD product.
Alarm Notification Methods
MDD products can transmit alarms via various methods, including via:
- Modem
- Pager
- SNMP Trap
Alarm messages can go over the network and sometimes over a modem. SNMP Traps are the most common form of alarm notification when integrating with a network management system. To receive SNMP Traps, customers may utilize their existing SNMP software or MDD AlarmManager software, which is now available free. Some products do not support modem alarms or email alarms.