The Monitoring Experts

Doing tech support in people's houses, dealing with smoky workplaces, and finding dead birds in PCs...Greg and Simon look back at their jobs 20 years ago, as well as considering some things that have changed since then. 
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Website: themonitoringexperts.com
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Roger Light is a Co-founder and Senior Developer at Cedalo, as well as the Lead Developer of Eclipse Mosquitto. He started Mosquitto as a hobby project in 2009, which gained rapid popularity and contributed to the widespread adoption of MQTT as an IoT protocol.

Resources and tips for monitoring MQTT: 

• Description of MQTT and more: What is MQTT?
• Deep dive into MQTT architecture for monitoring: Understanding MQTT architecture
• The history of MQTT: From Oil Pipelines to the IoT: A Brief History of MQTT
• Video tutorials of monitoring MQTT use cases with Paessler PRTG: Our new MQTT sensors: video tutorials

The Maker Monday YouTube series Shaun mentioned: Maker Monday playlist

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Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Simon Bell needed a way to automate turning his trace heating system on and off. He was already collecting weather data with his Davis Weather Station, and so he decided to use this as a trigger for the trace heating. His solution? When the temperature drops below a certain threshold, his monitoring tool sends a notification to a smart plug to turn on the trace heating. 

Simon comes on the podcast to talk through his solution step by step. 

Note that part of Simon's solution involves working with grid-powered power sockets. Before attempting this project, please read and understand the instructions and safety guidelines on the Tasmota project pages (links in the blog posts below).

Here are blogs Simon has already written about this:

• The Sonoff plug sockets: PRTG + Sonoff = Smart Meter and part 2, MQTT strikes back
• Monitoring a Davis Weather Station: How to keep track of the weather with PRTG
• Finally, the Trace Heating solution: How to keep warm (enough) with PRTG

Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
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Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
GET IN TOUCH

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Steve Guthman has been working in medical IT for decades. He joins us to discuss recent trends in healthcare IT (such as 3D imaging and AI), and then he explains what DICOM and HL7 are. These two medical industry standards can be leveraged to monitor healthcare infrastructure, specifically the modalities (imaging devices) and the systems around them. 

And Steve's advice for getting started with monitoring a medical healthcare facility: focus on quick wins first.

Steve Guthman's website: 104adt.com

Read more about monitoring healthcare IT on our blog: 

• From the Doctor to the Radiology Department and Back: Monitoring Your Healthcare Workflows
• Monitoring the modalities
• Monitoring the integration engine
• 4 Ways to monitor a PACS

Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
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Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
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Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Chances are, when you are in an airport, you don't give much thought to what's going on behind the scenes. But there are a lot of systems and interfaces involved in getting you from your arrival at the airport to boarding your flight. There is passenger check-in, baggage drop-off, flight info displays, physical security devices, and much more. And if any of these systems fail, major disruptions can ensue.

David Montoya joins us to describe the many moving parts of a typical airport, and he explains the importance of dashboards and a monitoring approach based on business processes.  
Do you have a monitoring question for us, or just general feedback about the podcast? Let us know:
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Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
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Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

In this episode, Jeremy Cioara and Erik Pope of Veeya join me to discuss how monitoring helps them provide technology services to chartered schools.

Modern schools are highly connected and digitized. Students are "walking devices" (as Jeremy puts it) and the school itself has dozens of connected devices. This brings with it the need to manage the infrastructure and bandwidth capacity. Not only is it important to have a real-time view of connectivity and bandwidth usage in the school network, but you need to understand the trends over time as well to understand how to optimize and upgrade.

Then there are regulatory requirements, like the Children's Internet Protection (CIPA) laws. An example of this is the need to ensure that content filtering is not only set up, but functioning at all times.

So how does monitoring help Veeya provide services to meet these challenges? What are the top things they need to keep an eye on? How do they monitor multiple schools? From DHCP pool monitoring through to utilizing Netflow technology to watch bandwidth, Jeremy and Erik give us a glimpse of what's involved in managing educational infrastructure.

Visit their Website: Veeya

Jeremy has also done YouTube videos about our product, Paessler PRTG: Jeremy Cioara on PRTG
Do you have a monitoring question for us, or just general feedback about the podcast? Let us know:
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Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 


Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
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Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Greg Sheridan and Glen Anderson have implemented a solar power system a their home lab in Sydney, Australia. Their system includes 400W solar panels with microinverters (which essentially lets them monitor each panel separately) and a Tesla Powerwall.

But what metrics are they monitoring? Greig and Glen differentiate between health status metrics, which indicate the status of the different components of the solar power system, and operational metrics, which help them optimize their power consumption on a day-to-day basis. And they also describe how their monitoring helped them make their service provider aware of a general problem.

You can find more information about how Greig and Glen monitor their solar power system at Greig's blog: Greig in Sydney
Specifically of interest are these articles:

• Get-PowerWallData.py
• Get-EnphaseData.py
• Get-EnphaseProduction.py

Other notes from our discussion:

• We also monitor the solar panels here at Paessler HQ - You wouldn't believe what we've learned in one year after installing a PV system on our roof
• Simon's article about monitoring his Davis weather station - How to keep track of the weather with PRTG

Do you have a monitoring question for us, or just general feedback about the podcast? Let us know:
Give us feedback

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 
Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
GET IN TOUCH

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Typical healthcare IT infrastructure has classic IT elements - routers, switches, firewalls, printers, and so on - as well as healthcare devices and systems. And if the infrastructure is large, there is even more complexity: not only are you dealing with disparate systems and devices, but also a lot of them. And that complexity is even more compounded due to the nature of medical devices - for example, it's not easy to simply enable SNMP on medical devices.

Willem Bouwman is a Senior Technical Application Manager at Leiden University Medical Center, and he needs to monitor infrastructure that has both IT elements and healthcare devices. To do this, he is working on centralizing the monitoring approach - but this is a massive challenge. He explains the difficulties he is facing bringing everything together into one monitoring overview, the challenges with medical devices, and what his next steps are.

Our case study with the LUMC: How the LUMC can monitor all its IT systems

A deep dive video about monitoring healthcare infrastructure: Is your healthcare IT HEALTHY?


Do you have a monitoring question for us, or just general feedback about the podcast? Let us know:
Give us feedback

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 


Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
GET IN TOUCH

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

Daren Fulwell of IP Fabric joins Simon Bell and Shaun Behrens of Paessler to talk about network automation. They cover what the perception of network automation is for IT administrators, their own perception of it, and how to approach it. 

Some tips that came out of the discussion for dealing with network automation: 

• Start with individual tasks 
• Focus on the solution and not the technology
• Understand the data flows that you are automating
• Automated tasks can be reused in multiple data flows 

Simon and Daren also discuss an example of automation involving an asset management tool (IP Fabric) and a monitoring tool (Paessler PRTG). Here is a link to the video of the use case:

Network automation – what does it actually mean?

You can find more details in this blog post by Daren:

Making sure your network is behaving as you intend
Get in contact on LinkedIn: 

• Daren Fulwell
• Simon Bell
• Shaun Behrens

Do you have a monitoring question for us, or just general feedback about the podcast? Let us know:
Give us feedback

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 
Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
GET IN TOUCH

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 

To understand how wastewater treatment plants are monitored, it first helps to understand the processes behind how water is treated. David Montoya, our monitoring expert in this episode, takes us through the different phases that water goes through in a treatment plant, which include filtering, clarifying (such as with ozone or bacteria), and disinfecting. Then he explains the combination of operational technology (OT) and IIoT components involved, how these should be monitored (including the common protocols used), and the importance of predictive maintenance.

The challenges of wastewater treatment facilities are unique: 

• The nature of water brings its own problems, such as corrosion or rusting of equipment. 
• Quality control is a concern too, and this requires accurate measurements and historical data. 
• There is a risk of cyber attacks (in fact, last year we featured an example of this on our blog - Cyberattack on water plant shows vulnerability of industrial networks
• Energy consumption of treatment facilities is a major concern

David explains how monitoring can help manage each of these specific challenges.


Do you have a monitoring question for us, or just general feedback about the podcast? Let us know:
Give us feedback

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts. 
Let us know your monitoring use cases, ask us a monitoring question, or just give us general feedback about the podcast:
GET IN TOUCH

Get in touch on Twitter: @monitoringxpert
Website: themonitoringexperts.com
Visit the Paessler blog for more from the monitoring experts.