24/7 Remote Monitoring of Air Quality Assets

If air quality monitoring is part of your business, service or compliance requirement, what is your contingency plan for unforeseen interruptions to your data due to loss of power or wireless connectivity? 

As manufacturers, we strive to provide the highest possible reliability and accuracy of air quality data when our devices are used in the field. Accordingly, South Coast Science is now operating a cloud-based device monitoring system, included at no extra cost, with all its Praxis air quality products using the company’s own data infrastructure. 

This new system generates real-time alerts should a problem be encountered with our Praxis air quality units in the field. This ensures a rapid response by the support team and gives our customers full confidence in their data, without needing to resource for maintenance checks. 

The new system offers the following benefits: 

• proactively monitor all your Praxis devices, wherever in the world they’re located, without any extra effort or cost 
• receive alerts if normal operation is interrupted so problems can be resolved swiftly
• anticipate the risk of device failure and put in appropriate mitigation measures 

The monitoring system runs 24 x 7 and will check every Praxis unit in the field at 15min intervals, as follows: 

1/ Online status? 

It is in the nature of 4G communications that connections will drop for short periods. Connections that are lost for more than 30 minutes are reported. 

2/ Is the device reporting? 

If a sensor fails, a device will typically stop communicating on a specific data topic. The monitor checks that all expected topics are active. 

3/ Is the device still powered? 

The most common problem encountered by a device is the loss of input power. A praxis can continue operating on its internal battery for several hours, but an unexpected power loss should be investigated as soon as practical. 

4/ Has the device rebooted recently? 

A Praxis can run for months or even years without a reboot. However, the device will automatically reboot itself to clear some types of modem problem. Frequent reboots should be investigated.

The device monitoring system sends email alerts for all devices to South Coast Science, and we encourage customers to nominate email recipients for their own devices. Replies to these emails are forwarded to the support team at South Coast Science. 

Device monitoring is offered free-of-charge to all customers that use the South Coast Science data infrastructure. 

We hope that this new feature will appeal to any company with an interest in compliance or cost of ownership of their air quality instruments. 

For more information please contact David.Johnson@southcoastscience.com.