Modern IT allows a large range of devices to be monitored. With monitoring enabled, your plant can respond to information such as equipment temperatures, processing power, communications bandwidth and various security related indicators.

Casting a wide net on which devices you’re monitoring maximises your visibility and options. Effective monitoring covers both upstream and downstream devices and softwares to analyse how the whole system is performing.

Whilst monitoring is powerful, large amounts of information in disconnected systems quickly become a headache to work with. Centralising data into one easy to work with portal makes analysing problems more effective and efficient.

Automation means flagging issues more efficiently, perhaps even before they occur. Automation also frees staff from performing mundane monitoring tasks and reduces human error.

Ensure staff have the right competencies and capacity to use, analyse and manage your monitoring ecosystem. To maximise institutional knowledge, support and cost, balance internal staff with trusted external contractors.

As your needs or environment changes, your monitoring practices and processes will also need to evolve. Make re-evaluating your monitoring systems part of any relevant project.

Most modern power plants don’t exist as isolated ecosystems. Therefore, monitoring things such upstream software, hardware or regulatory announcements and changes can be crucial to ensuring your plants current security or operational risk.

Skilled monitoring can help flag event before they occur. This might include flagging equipment about to go offline, unreliable internet connectivity, communication networks most likely to fail or security attacks about to occur.

Rather than waiting for a person to notice and then communicate an issue, effective monitoring flags issues with relevant staff as they occur.

As monitoring also enables increased security, improving monitoring capabilities is a way of increasing a plants AECSF Compliance whilst also improving their own operational effectiveness and risk profile.

Strong monitoring systems make it more efficient to diagnose the root cause of a problem.

As monitoring makes problems easier to diagnose, implementing fixes also become more accurate and efficient reducing plant downtime.