Remote Diagnostics Monitoring logical for Preemptive support, and Higher Availability.

I talked about last week the influence of IT on the strategies for System Administration/ Diagnostics with respect to drive towards using off the shelf IT tools for System Admin such as Microsoft’s System Center.  But there is another trait form It coming into software and that is the desire for pro-active monitoring of the software systems, vs the traditional just logging of systems.

I was in an executive meeting a couple of years ago in Southern Africa, where we had a number of the CIOs from some of the world leading companies and we discussed the shortage of expertise, the outsourcing of IT and engineering, and the increasing complexity of solutions, and most of all the ever changing evolution of modern software components of a solution. These brainstorming discussions around one table with a set of leading thought leaders , brought up challenges and opportunities.

One of the key challengers was having expertise on internal teams that understood the error measures , best practices and can stay up to date, as it is hard to (impossible to have dedicated people) to one system or product. Now this has been solved by traditional database companies, and systems, by these companies providing a diagnostics / monitoring service that pro-actively   the site systems, with a dedicated team of product experts, who are up date and can dedicate 100% of their time to staying up to date. In the "Business Applications Software" segement and in DCS hardware, and High availability hardware companies this has existed for a long time, but  not in the traditional automation software sector. But again in the last 2 years we have seen this practice, or service come being offered.   

Already Invensys Southern Africa  has set up and is offering this service as an Invensys Sentinel service:

“As skills scarcity increases, most production technicians are stretched to the limit with their Daily tasks. Little time is left to maintain the running software systems and very few can find the time to develop and maintain specialist knowledge to diagnose faults on these systems.

As a result of this change in market conditions, Invensys offers Sentinel Services (ISS) technology that monitors the performance of your Wonderware system — continuously.

Invensys delivers the following Sentinel Services capabilities:

·          Continuous proactive monitoring

·          Remedial remote diagnosis support

·          Wonderware system health review

Command Center in South Africa

We achieve this by installing special “agent software” on each Wonderware server located at customer sites. These agents monitor the system on a 24x7 basis to ensure that critical resources are performing within best practice norms.

If an unacceptable threshold is reached, an alarm is raised and Invensys engineers are alerted before an issue develops. Remote connectivity is also designed to ensure that, if there is a problem, Invensys experts can work with you to make appropriate adjustments to correct the issue and return your system to normal operation quickly and easily.

It is typical of the innovation of the Southern African team, and you can expect to see this evolve into a main stream offering over the next 12 months.

Again these CIOs (eg IT) had an expectation of the fact they can monitor their business datbases and applications and systems by external services with with the expertise WHY NOT in the automation/ operations software. Another example of impact of existing IT practices and it been adopted as an acceptable practice in this automation sector.

But I would question the need for just monitoring we want to go to exception based awareness of the software systems, and treat these as assets in your production system just like the your large capex assets such as furnaces, bottling lines, pump stations, WHY NOT? I would like to start down this topic this week and expand to making Software apart of Asset Maintenance strategies.