What is IoT Device Monitoring and what are the benefits?

IOT device monitoring is the process of discovering, monitoring, and managing your connected devices. It analyzes data, provides insights, informs you of any issues affecting the business, and gives actionable answers for all your connected devices.

With IoT, it becomes paramount to design monitoring systems which will be compatible with different kinds of devices and at the same time detect intrusions, security breaches, performance drops or failures efficiently. A wide range of applications can be monitored including processes, events and logs.

Edge processing most efficient in IoT device monitoring

What is also very important in IoT device monitoring is to have a resource-efficient infrastructure for performing the IoT device monitoring.

Traditionally, cloud and server infrastructure has been used as the typical architecture. The drawback with this approach is that it is very heavy on server-processing with the client continuously sending metrics and data to the server. A server-heavy architecture means that responding to issues tends to have longer cycle times. What should take milliseconds to fix may require many round trips to different cloud services, and even humans being involved, before the issue is resolved. We also can not forget about the scale. While the typical server monitoring installation consists of several hundred or maybe thousands of devices it is not uncommon for the IoT installation to consist of several hundred thousands or even millions of connected devices. The traditional monitoring infrastructure is most of the time not designed to handle the load at such a scale.

On top of the scale issues, it is much more efficient for saving bandwidth usage to leverage edge processing and perform IoT monitoring as explained in the release of the Mender Monitor add-on.

Mender Monitor is designed for intermittent connectivity and uses close to zero bandwidth. This is achieved by moving the logic and configuration from the server to the edge device.

The Mender documentation describes how to configure and enable the Mender Monitor add-on. Benefits of IoT device monitoring There are generally 5 key benefits from designing and rolling out IoT device monitoring systems:

• Detection and analysis of health issues of devices, services and applications
• Intrusion detections
• Notifications about critical parameters reaching threshold
• Alerts pertaining to the failure of the corresponding machine
• Identification of an encrypted connection existing between the two nodes

IoT monitoring & remote operations across industry

Across industry, remote operations is the ability to control, monitor, and manage your endpoints in the field from any location. It enables you to perform changes remotely and investigate endpoint status in real time, reducing the need for on-site visits.

In manufacturing, IoT device monitoring is typically used in conjunction with remote operations to decrease factory downtime by operating and servicing manufacturing machines remotely, enabling employees to boost productivity.

In other industries like building & infrastructure for example, IoT device monitoring might be used in conjunction with remote operations to change device settings on cooling/heating or lighting systems; or manage digital signage remotely – reducing manual effort, cutting energy costs, and saving resources.

In utilities & renewable energy, IoT device monitoring is typically used to centrally evaluate system performance and ensure optimal functioning of renewable energy equipment (e.g., windmills, solar panels) regardless of how dispersed they are while in logistics & transportation it can be used to conduct the majority of required freight ship health checks while traveling, and schedule field service maintenance in a more cost efficient way.

Try out Mender Monitor for your fleet of IoT devices

If you want to perform secure and robust remote monitoring of your IoT devices from POC to scale, try out the Mender Monitor. It is an add-on to the Mender Enterprise OTA software updates solution and available in a trial for up to 10 devices. Mender Monitor is the most modern way to perform IoT device monitoring with its use of edge processing limiting bandwidth usage and facilitating intermittent device connectivity.

The best place to do a quick test of the new release from scratch. Sign up for a new Free trial and all features and add-ons are available for 12 months for free.

Follow this tutorial to get started with Mender Monitor.

Get an in-depth overview of Mender Monitor.

We also have tutorials on our community site the Mender Hub to help you solve your various remote monitoring use cases for your devices. In this case, setting up secure and remote monitoring for a Raspberry Pi.