This can make it difficult to pinpoint device failures.
Traditionally, safety devices are hardwired in a series and lack diagnostic data. Smart safety devices can also reduce downtime. They can also provide insights into their health and communication status to help technicians address issues quickly and possibly before they cause downtime. Smart sensors, for example, can monitor virtually any parameter of an operation to create a clear picture of what’s happening with an asset, process, or even entire facility. With that in mind, here are three key technologies that can help improve maintenance strategies and reduce – or even avoid – unplanned downtime:Ī wide range of smart devices provide diagnostic and operational insights to help technicians respond to issues quickly and proactively. However, sometimes all companies need is an understanding of the enabling technologies to spark an idea. And in some cases, the best approach is to bring in an experienced partner that can bring focus and purpose to a smart maintenance initiative.
This can seem like a lofty endeavor given the wide range of smart devices and software available on the market. Instead, every company must decide what maintenance problems it wants to solve and what technologies can solve those problems while delivering the best ROI.
There’s no rulebook that defines what smart maintenance is or how to implement it. And a smarter, more efficient and data-driven approach to maintenance is something industry needs right now as challenges like the global skills shortage and pandemic threaten uptime and productivity. This digital transformation is often discussed in the context of “smart manufacturing.” But it’s just as relevant to machine maintenance as it is machine operation. Connected, more data-driven operations combined with disruptive technology like augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are unleashing unprecedented production insights and new and smarter ways of working. Today, innovation abounds in manufacturing.
More than 100 years ago, for example, Henry Ford’s famed moving assembly line proved to be a far more productive alternative to relying on “runners” to deliver parts to autoworkers at a 50,000-square-foot production plant. It is better to allow the SNMP Poller monitor to do the threshold comparison though because the alert messaging will be more clear and the metric can be retained for graphing purposes, if desired.Downtime is a challenge as old as manufacturing itself – and something that industry has long solved with innovation. If these values are exceeded, UCD-SNMP-MIB::prErrorFlag will be set to 1 (otherwise it is zero). These are max and min values for the number of occurrences of the process. Two values are required, along with the process name, when adding the proc directive to nf. For each of the processes specified in nf using the "proc" directive, UCD-SNMP-MIB::prCount.x will contain the number of occurrences of that process. The OID specified when configuring the SNMP Poller monitor is UCD-SNMP-MIB::prCount (.1.3.6.1.2.5).
For a full description of each of the OIDs in the prTable, see. The MIB being leveraged for this SNMP query is UCD-SNMP-MIB, which is usually a regular part of a Net-SNMP install, and the table of interest is the prTable. If the occurrence is greater than one, a warning alert will be sent and if it is less than one, a critical alert will be sent. This SNMP Poller will pull back the number of occurrences of the processes specified with the proc directive in nf. Enter desired alerting intervals and click Finish.Click the Use Table Column radio button, select prNames from the drop down and click Add.In Uptime Infrastructure Monitor, create an SNMP Poller monitor.Restart the Net-SNMP service for the change to be read in.Edit nf on the Net-SNMP target system and add the following line (multiple similar "proc" lines can be specified as well).I'll give the steps first and the logic follows later in the article. With a few extra lines added to nf and a SNMP Poller monitor, it is possible to set up process count monitoring and alerting for Net-SNMP elements. Processes metrics are not available by default via Net-SNMP therefore the Net-SNMP collection method in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor does not gather process metrics.