Introduction
The continuously growing count of IoT devices creates the necessity to use IoT monitoring to ensure their reliable and uninterrupted operation.
This article explains what IoT monitoring is, its benefits and challenges, and what IoT data should be monitored. We also explain how IoT monitoring systems work and give some tips on how to make monitoring effective.
IoT Monitoring Overview
What is IoT Monitoring?
IoT monitoring refers to the automated collection of data from IoT devices and sensors, which is then transformed into a format that can be easily understood by humans for further analysis. This process is facilitated by specialized tools designed for IoT monitoring, which provide efficient management capabilities and offer insights into the overall state of the IoT infrastructure.
By leveraging IoT monitoring tools, organizations can gather valuable statistics on device performance and quickly identify any malfunctions or performance-related concerns. Additionally, these tools provide information regarding potential methods for error correction, offering guidance on resolving issues effectively.
You can use IoT monitoring to monitor the status of IoT devices and the equipment to which they are connected.
Monitoring IoT relies on an MQTT broker that enables efficient and secure communication between connected devices, enabling real-time data exchange.
Why is IoT Monitoring important?
Monitoring IoT is an important process to ensure the efficient, stable, safe, and reliable operation of the IoT system. It allows you to effectively monitor the operation of all IoT devices in the network, which cannot be done manually.
With the help of IoT monitoring, you can detect potential problems before they occur and take measures to eliminate them, which allows you to maintain the system in working condition constantly. System administrators can learn about the status and need for maintenance of devices without manual inspection, which allows significant time and cost savings.
Analysis of monitoring data allows you to identify trends and patterns used to optimize processes and identify new opportunities.
IoT monitoring enables organizations to make data-driven decisions, reduce costs, and improve customer experience.
How does IoT Monitoring work?
Companies use special IoT monitoring tools to monitor the Internet of Things. These tools allow organizations to collect many performance metrics from various IoT devices and sensors and transfer them to a single centralized IoT monitoring system. After transmission, collected data are processed and stored for further analysis.
IoT monitoring system constantly analyzes input data in real-time. It allows you to monitor the state and behavior of devices, detect anomalies, and initiate actions based on predefined threshold values.
You can analyze monitoring data using various graphs, charts, maps, and tables. They allow you to understand the current state of devices and identify trends and problems. You can also create reports over a certain period for a detailed analysis of the performance of IoT devices and systems.
In case of exceeding the threshold values of some indicators, the monitoring system can send automatic notifications through various communication channels, such as e-mail, SMS, etc. This allows you to react to the problem in time and avoid failures and downtimes.
IoT monitoring systems have tools for remote control and monitoring. Administrators can remotely access, configure, update software, and troubleshoot IoT devices.
What IoT data should companies monitor?
Monitoring IoT devices and sensors
To ensure that IoT devices are working efficiently, monitoring their resources, such as memory and CPU usage, is necessary. In addition, you need to control the software running on IoT devices.
You can control equipment parameters such as voltage, amperage, and temperature. It is also possible to monitor the connection of individual sensors to ensure that they are active and working properly.
Cloud monitoring
Monitoring the cloud is critically important, as the performance of all devices connected to it depends on the efficiency of the cloud. Key metrics to monitor include CPU and memory usage, percentage of failed requests, and number of active and inactive connections.
These metrics help you identify problems at the root of your server and determine when you need to scale.
Network monitoring
Since IoT devices use the network to transmit data, ensuring they are connected to a reliable, high-speed network is important. To analyze network performance, monitoring indicators such as delay time, number of packet errors, and retransmissions is necessary.
IoT Monitoring: Benefits
Productivity improvement
IoT monitoring allows you to identify and eliminate performance problems and optimize resource allocation, increasing productivity and saving time and money.
Security improvements
IoT monitoring allows the real-time control of device activity, network traffic, and other security indicators, which helps administrators detect security threats and respond to them on time.
Identifying potential malfunctions
By analyzing monitoring data, organizations can identify potential malfunctions before they occur and take action to prevent them. This allows you to avoid unexpected downtime and loss of customers and money.
Centralized management
IoT monitoring systems provide centralized monitoring tools that allow organizations to manage a large number of IoT devices effectively.
Improved customer experience
By using monitoring data, organizations can analyze user behavior and preferences. This information can be used to personalize services, tailor offers, and improve customer support, leading to better customer interactions and customer satisfaction.
Statistics in real-time
IoT monitoring provides an opportunity to obtain information about the performance and behavior of IoT devices in real-time. Based on this information, organizations can quickly make decisions, respond to failures, and optimize the performance of devices.
IoT Monitoring: Challenges
Despite the many benefits of monitoring IoT, there are also some challenges that companies must consider.
A large amount of data
Organizations often have many IoT devices that generate huge amounts of data. Managing and processing this data can be complex and require robust infrastructure, analytical capabilities, and technical expertise.
Ensuring data security
IoT devices can be vulnerable to cyber-attacks and compromise the security of the IoT infrastructure. Companies must implement robust security measures to protect devices and data.
Ensuring uninterrupted communication
Companies typically have different types of IoT devices and platforms, which can lead to interoperability issues. This requires companies to establish interoperability standards and protocols.
IoT Monitoring: Best Practices
To make IoT monitoring effective, there are some important tips to follow.
- Set monitoring goals. Determine what you want to monitor and what data is important to keep. Keep only relevant data. This will reduce storage costs and the collection of unnecessary data.
- Define key performance indicators (KPIs) that match your monitoring goals. Set specific threshold values that determine the normal operation of devices. Ensure that selected KPIs are actionable and provide meaningful information for decision-making and performance optimization. Set up automatic alerts when metrics exceed set thresholds.
- Categorize notifications. Notifications can be critical, warning, and informational. Set a different alarm for each type of notification so that administrators can quickly determine the priority when an alarm occurs.
- Take care of data security. Implement robust security measures to protect your IoT monitoring infrastructure. Secure device connectivity, encryption, authentication, and access control mechanisms are essential to prevent unauthorized access and data leakage.
Future Trends in IoT Monitoring
The number of IoT devices is constantly growing, and IT infrastructures are becoming more complex. This leads to the need to create IoT monitoring systems that efficiently process the ever-growing volume of IoT data.
In the future, AI technologies will play a significant role in IoT monitoring. They can quickly and efficiently analyze large volumes of data, identify anomalies, and make predictions.
Ensuring the security of IoT devices and data will remain an important task as the number of IoT devices increases, so the likelihood of cyber attacks increases. To protect the IoT ecosystem, IoT monitoring tools must implement reliable encryption and authentication methods and behavioral analytics.
The advent of 5G networks will positively impact IoT monitoring, as they offer low latency, high throughput, and increased network reliability. Thanks to this, it will be possible to simultaneously monitor and control more IoT devices in real time.
Wrapping up
The number of IoT devices and the data they generate is constantly increasing. Therefore, managing devices and ensuring their uninterrupted operation is a difficult task.
IoT monitoring is important to ensure the stable and reliable operation of IoT devices and infrastructure. IoT monitoring systems can automatically collect and analyze data from thousands of IoT devices, which cannot be done manually.
Monitoring IoT allows organizations to detect performance problems in time, predict device maintenance, and find errors in their operation, even before they lead to failures. This allows you to reduce costs and prevent unwanted failures and downtime.
Author‘s bio:
As an accomplished technology enthusiast, Laurenz Dallinger has a strong interest in digital transformation, with a particular focus on IoT. His commitment to advancing the field of device communication is evident in his work as a speaker and exhibitor at events like the Ars Electronica Museum. As a valued member of the Cedalo team, the company behind the top MQTT broker, Laurenz is passionate about sharing his knowledge and ideas with developers seeking new and efficient ways of communicating with devices.
