We were part of a project sponsored by AT&T Labs to monitor alarm conditions in over 200 labs across North America from a single web interface. Included was a dashboard so that alarm status, specific resolution team details, as well as alarm resolution could be tracked and reported to senior management.

To achieve that goal, we developed a distributed system composed of many “agent” computers (low power Linux computers) monitoring sensor data (one in each lab facility) that communicated with the building’s BACNet stack to acquire data from the Siemens BAS (Building Automation System) and post it securely over SSL to the cloud API.

These agents feature a user configurable interface, a management dashboard to monitor and manage the status of these agents, a “dispatcher web interface” to dispatch a North America wide distributed team of technicians when problems are detected in a lab, as well as a cloud API to collect the data acquired by the agent in a secure manner. Finally, we developed a NOC application to manage the agents across multiple sites.