Monitoring Building and HVAC Infrastructure

Keith Bromley

Monitoring of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) infrastructures has become a key concern over the last several years. Modern versions of these systems need continual monitoring to stay energy efficient and deliver satisfactory comfort to building occupants. This is because there are a large number of environmental sensors and motorized control systems within HVAC systems. Proper monitoring helps maintain a consistent temperature to reduce energy and maintenance costs for this type of infrastructure.

By deploying Ethernet-based taps, building personnel and network managers have easy access to data from HVAC systems. After taps are installed, a network packet broker (NPB) is used to aggregate data from the various taps. The NPB will capture, filter, and regenerate specific pieces of data as needed and forward that data on to individual application performance monitoring (APM) tools that can be used to examine the data.

The NPB also provides the internal ability to load balance data to multiple APM tools. This allows IT personnel the ability to deploy n+1 survivability. The traffic load is divided up evenly across the number of allocated tools. Should one or more of the tools fail, the data is still split evenly across the remaining number of tools. If the number of tools is dimensioned correctly, there will be no loss of data.

The solution ends up looking like the following:


The monitoring solution described here provides the following benefits:

■ Reuse of the existing Ethernet infrastructure

■ 24 x 7 remote access to the HVAC data and system controls

■ Cost reduction due to faster alerting of system problems

■ Deployment of n+1 survivability for HVAC monitoring tools

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Monitoring Building and HVAC Infrastructure

Keith Bromley

Monitoring of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) infrastructures has become a key concern over the last several years. Modern versions of these systems need continual monitoring to stay energy efficient and deliver satisfactory comfort to building occupants. This is because there are a large number of environmental sensors and motorized control systems within HVAC systems. Proper monitoring helps maintain a consistent temperature to reduce energy and maintenance costs for this type of infrastructure.

By deploying Ethernet-based taps, building personnel and network managers have easy access to data from HVAC systems. After taps are installed, a network packet broker (NPB) is used to aggregate data from the various taps. The NPB will capture, filter, and regenerate specific pieces of data as needed and forward that data on to individual application performance monitoring (APM) tools that can be used to examine the data.

The NPB also provides the internal ability to load balance data to multiple APM tools. This allows IT personnel the ability to deploy n+1 survivability. The traffic load is divided up evenly across the number of allocated tools. Should one or more of the tools fail, the data is still split evenly across the remaining number of tools. If the number of tools is dimensioned correctly, there will be no loss of data.

The solution ends up looking like the following:


The monitoring solution described here provides the following benefits:

■ Reuse of the existing Ethernet infrastructure

■ 24 x 7 remote access to the HVAC data and system controls

■ Cost reduction due to faster alerting of system problems

■ Deployment of n+1 survivability for HVAC monitoring tools

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

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