This release of the WattIQ Cloud system contains a number of enhancements across the entire system, including additions to Utilization product reports and metrics, Condition Monitoring alerts, and management of sockets and hardware.
General Reporting Enhancements
Across both Utilization and Condition products, the following enhancements apply to all Reports:
- Exporting the data from a report into a CSV for use in Excel no longer has a block header, making it easier to use exported data immediately in other tools
- A filter condition was added to the reports, allowing a report to include or exclude assets which are missing a specific class of asset ID, as desired. This can be useful in excluding things from management reports which may require updates or metadata changes.
Utilization Product
Within our Utilization product, we added several additional metrics, which can help customers understand the details of usage patterns. Our default metric "Average Daily Usage" calculates the number of minutes (or hours) per day an asset was in use, calculated over all days for which we have data. This, along with "% Time in Use", get at overall utilization and help you discover assets which are lightly used across a time range.
It may be of interest in some cases to understand whether, when assets are used, how heavily are they used. For example, a class of equipment may only be used at some stage of an experiment or process, but when it is used, the demand for the instrument is high and it is used intensively for some period. To get at these situations, we added the following:
- Avg. Daily Usage (only days used)
- Avg. Uses Per Day (only days used)
- % Time in Use (only days used)
In each of these cases, the averages are calculated not over all days with data, but using only the days for which one or more usage events were recorded. In the following screenshot, you can see the effect of looking at both types of metrics side by side:
In some cases, the two statistics are relatively close, which indicates truly sporadic usage -- not only are some assets used on very few days, but they're used very few times on those days. But in other cases -- such as the fifth row in this example -- an asset that is relatively lightly used over the entire time period is actually fairly intensively used on those days where it shows usage. The newly introduced metrics should help customers understand these variable usage patterns.
Condition Monitoring
In this release, we introduced a new Alert Rule for power thresholds, and added live power consumption readings to the Status tab, so that you can see live power readings along with live temperature and (if installed) door sensors.
The "Asset Power Threshold" allows you to receive an alert if power consumption crosses a threshold for some set of assets, for longer than a period of time you select. This can be useful in understanding when some equipment is malfunctioning. Note that this alert rule can also be evaluated with the power dropping BELOW a threshold, which would be useful in telling you if critical equipment loses power and shuts off.
Hardware Management
In this release, we made several enhancements to managing your fleet of gateways and sensors. First, we introduced the ability to seamlessly move sockets or sensors between gateways. This is a guided process, which will be documented with step by step examples in our Documentation section.
Second, customers can add notes to gateways, which can help in tracking information about your physical installation. Finally, we made gateway names and notes simply editable without having the Installer application and the USB/serial connection to the gateway. This should simplify management and make correcting mistakes much simpler.