Monitoring M2M applications in the energy utility sector

M2M or IoT applications gain more and more traction in various industrial sectors.

Paving the way since a few years already is the automotive sector (“connected cars”): All new cars getting out of the factory since then, are equipped with in-built wireless modems and SIM cards, to be used for e-calls, remote diagnosis, but also for infotainment.

The performance monitoring of M2M applications based on mobile communication services has since ever been part of the operational tasks of the mobile operators themselves.

The users of such services were totally relying on the quality they expected to get from their telco providers, they expected them to have all tools in place to guarantee the required service level.

A first change has happened in the IoT/M2M space when car manufacturers started being concerned about connectivity of their M2M enabled cars in their major markets. Some of them have put strong requirements to the network operator of their choice, to setup test programs to ensure that all quality KPI are met in various roaming scenarios. ?Others started to engage directly with firms like Mobileum, the market leader in the testing & monitoring domain, to setup test solutions & strategies to check that connected cars deserve their name.

?Now, also energy utility companies in Germany started getting interested into real time monitoring solutions to check the 24/7 availability and performance of the IoT access and backbone network from an E2E perspective.

These companies do not just want to rely on assured network connectivity which they get from their mobile network partners.

The reason for that is evident: Telcos do verify connectivity from their point of view: They check and monitor their own network(s) only, their own and/or their partner’s SIM cards, and their preferred or predefined APN.

Energy utility companies, as well as other industries adopting M2M technologies, do have more enhanced requirements: The majority of them have partnered with 2 or even more telco operators, their M2M devices communicate with their backend applications via a lot of different APN, these applications do run – fully cloud based - at different data centers and cloud providers. All these various communication paths need to be permanently monitored, making sure that outages are detected in real time, communication delays are kept to a minimum, and bandwidth requirements are fulfilled from the M2M device down to the data end point of the communication path.

Mobileum do have a solution in place to cover all the monitoring and real time alarming requirement for M2M industry users.

With this solution, a company out of the energy utility sector detected problems such as service outages during the failure of a redundant data center which had to handle incoming M2M traffic in an overload situation, and service interruptions because one of the telco partners decreased the output power of their base stations during night times. The real time alarms created by the test system gave the right indications to pinpoint the root cause of the problems, and to start immediate service recovery measures.

The company admitted that they wouldn’t have seen these service degradations without having the Mobileum test tool in place

Mobileum would be happy to discuss further use cases around M2M/IoT quality monitoring solutions let's get in touch and talk !

Markus Zimmermann

Regional Vice President Central & East Europe