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An introduction to Monitoring Fundamentals strictly from the perspective of telecom network alarm management.
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Reserve Your Seat TodayIt's vitally important to monitor the temperature levels at your remote sites. To get the most detailed visibility of site temperature, you need a remote that monitors four separate analog thresholds.
With four thresholds you can set separate major and minor alarms for both high and low temperatures. This gives you both an advanced warning if temperatures are starting to leave the optimum range (e.g., the air conditioner is not working right and the temperature has risen to 80°F) and a final notification when temperatures have reached the danger point (e.g., the air conditioner is not working at all, and the temperature is 100°F).
Knowing both inside and outside temperatures gives you the overall picture. Imagine if the outside temperature is 150°F and your AC stopped working, with this knowledge you know you better dispatch a technician fast as the temperature is sure to rise quickly.
Monitoring several areas for temperature is a good idea. It is recommended that you monitor the temperature around your critical equipment and the RTU, as well as the outside temperature.
Excessive heat cooks electronic equipment, even carrier-grade telecom gear. It's essential to constantly monitor temperature at your remote sites with four-threshold and live value analog alarms. Heat also damages other equipment. High temperatures will dramatically shorten the useful life of your batteries. A lead leadacid battery that would last 10 years under ordinary conditions will last only a year if it's consistently operated at temperatures over 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
In a recent case a telecommunications company lost a remote site with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment due to the lack of temperature monitoring. With the added heat radiation of servers and equipment, the site quickly turned into an oven cooking the equipment beyond repair.
It's important to monitor the HVAC systems that maintain your remote site environment. If you can catch an air conditioning failure early, you can intervene, start repairs and restore the remote site environment before equipment goes into thermal shutdown or the site goes dark.
Don't forget to also provide a secondary power supply for HVAC systems. An often-overlooked danger of power outages is that the telecom equipment will continue to run on backup power while the air conditioning, connected only to commercial power, is out. The equipment keeps running, the heat keeps rising, until the temperature forces a thermal shutdown.
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