Enabling mobility in network monitoring

Mobile devices are now more common in the workplace than ever before. Modern mobile apps now allow industrial network operators to monitor and troubleshoot their networks while on the move.

Engineers face different challenges during each stage of the industrial network management life cycle. During the installation stage, manual device configuration and testing is time-consuming and prone to human error. During the operation stage, engineers are required to monitor network status in real time and minimise system downtime. During the maintenance stage, engineers often face long labour hours doing firmware upgrades or configuration changes on multiple devices. During the operational stage, being able to quickly identify where critical network issues occur is essential. To help minimise the total cost of ownership, engineers are always on the lookout for new industrial network management tools that can help them overcome all of these challenges.

Industrial network management software is usually installed in the control room or is sometimes integrated with an existing SCADA system. But when you’re out of the control room or on the move, you could miss important messages such as network changes or errors, and fail to respond quickly enough. With the number of devices connected to industrial networks continually increasing, the ability to monitor and maintain a network at any time and from any location is becoming more crucial for reliable and smooth network operation.

Current statistics show that globally, the number of mobile users is now greater than the number of desktop users, and we can expect this global trend to expand into the industrial automation workplace. In fact, since engineers joining the workforce today are accustomed to using mobile devices in their private life, it is only natural that they would want to use the same devices to simplify their work life.

A mobile monitoring tool can help with the challenges of industrial network management and keep operators informed of network status, even when on the move.

Major challenges in industrial network management

Managing a network can be a complex and often extensive operation, especially for industrial networks, and being able to monitor and manage devices is essential to ensuring that the network is running smoothly. However, with evolving business operations, operators are often on the move, making it difficult to stay informed of, or quickly respond to, status changes in the network.

When doing regular maintenance or troubleshooting at a field site where many network devices are deployed, engineers often face the daunting task of identifying specific devices hiding among a multitude of identical devices. Even with proper labelling and hardware placement, it can still take time to obtain the status information of a specific device on-site. As a result, faulty devices cannot be swapped out as quickly as desired.

With the development of mobile networking tools, engineers can now improve operational efficiency and maximise network availability.

Why mobile network monitoring?

Like their enterprise counterparts, automation engineers can now access their operational applications from mobile devices by installing an appropriate network monitoring app. The mobile network monitoring app is usually a client software tool designed to work in tandem with the network management software installed in the control room.

Figure 1 illustrates how a typical mobile app for network monitoring works to keep users informed of their network’s status. The app connects to the software server over an intranet or the internet to access network status in real time. In addition, if the network is updated, the network management software server will send a push notification via the Apple cloud or Google cloud to alert the app user.

Figure 1: A mobile phone app for network monitoring usually works as the client of the main network management software.

Mobile networking empowers operators

A mobile network monitoring app should support the following three features to ensure that monitoring a network from a mobile device is worth the effort: real-time alerts, real-time network checks, field device location.

Real-time alerts

With a mobile network monitoring app, operators can receive notifications of events pushed to their mobile devices. These real-time alerts allow administrators to take action immediately in response to critical events, even when they are out of the control room. For example, once an alert is received, they can contact maintenance engineers to do on-site troubleshooting and consequently reduce system downtime.

Instant network checks

A mobile network app allows users to check the status of a network in real time. After the user logs in to the app, it will inform them as to whether or not the network is operating normally. The app will also display detailed information of a specific network device, keeping network administrators in the know while they are on the move or out of the control room. Information, such as a device’s IP address, MAC address, location and firmware version can be viewed from the app. For example, if an engineer receives an alert for a link-down event, they can readily access the information needed to determine which port is faulty.

Finding field devices

In certain scenarios, it could take a long time to manually search for a specific device from racks and racks of similar devices. In addition, if automation engineers need to access the parameters or settings of a specific device for on-site troubleshooting, they would need to physically connect the device to a laptop computer using a web console or CLI (command line interface), or physically read the MAC address or serial number printed on the device, and then check the information with the computer. Either way, the engineer could end up spending much more time than would be necessary if the same information could be checked using a mobile device.

To make the task easier and more efficient, mobile network monitoring apps now usually come with a function that allows users to quickly find a particular device, and even view detailed device information.

For example, each network device could be encoded with a unique QR code based on its MAC address. If the mobile phone app supports a built-in QR code scanner, engineers can scan the device’s QR code on-site to pull up information about that device, without needing to boot up a laptop computer or entering a device ID manually.

An example case

To ensure that a network operates reliably, industrial network management software is usually installed in large-scale networks in mission-critical industries, such as transportation, mining, and oil and gas. What these industries have in common is that they usually involve a geographically dispersed network infrastructure.

The power of mobile network monitoring in such distributed applications can be illustrated with a success story from a railway application that uses a fibre Ethernet backbone built for data transmission between several stations located across a wide area. Since the application involves multiple control rooms spread over some distance, the industrial network management software and the mobile phone app can help engineers access network status in real time and then respond quickly, thereby greatly reducing system downtime.

This high-speed railway operator built a fibre Ethernet backbone for data transmission between its operations management centre and other railway stations to ensure high network availability. The customer used approximately 30 industrial rackmount switches to connect to the pre-existing Layer 3 networks, and used an industrial network management suite across the network management life cycle — for installation, operation, maintenance and diagnostics.

The railway operator’s network administrators recounted that they sometimes needed to leave the control room for patrol inspections within and around the remote stations. Since a network management system was already installed in the control room, and there was a supporting mobile app they could install, they could easily check the latest network status from their mobile phones. The dashboard design of the app made it easy for engineers to tell whether the network is operating under Normal, Warning or Critical condition. In one notable incident, an IT engineer received a push notification about a downed link while away from the control room, used the app to determine where the broken link was located and also connected to the network management server to determine the cause. After determining the cause, the engineer contacted on-site staff immediately, allowing them to get the network link back up and running as soon as possible.

Conclusion

The use of effective network management applications can help industrial network operators accomplish tasks efficiently during different stages of the network management life cycle. With the changing business environment and improvements in mobile device technology, a mobile app for network monitoring allows administrators to be efficient, effective and responsive when monitoring and maintaining an industrial network.

Using a mobile app for network monitoring, operators can view device and network status and receive real-time alerts from their mobile devices while on the move. In the field, administrators can quickly search for any device and view that device’s detailed configuration parameters with the click of a button.

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