Single 'vertical' control and monitoring systems proliferate, largely due to the typical selection of ‘best of breed’ input device types for specific monitoring requirements. These isolated systems often fail to deliver business value owing to the siloed view of the operational technology environment, with operators left to manually composite an overall view of the environment from separate network elements.
Delivering a comprehensive environmental monitoring solution can be complex due to the wide variety of underlying business requirements, input device types, outputs, rules and logic, or dependencies that can impact the necessary information for an operational overview. Additionally, sites that are subject to environmental monitoring are often either intermittently attended, or remote, or both.

Typical inputs include:

Typical outputs include:

Water infrastructure - Status or flow rates. Power distribution infrastructure – Status, volts, amps, or overall load. Heating and cooling systems – Status, temperature, humidity, or egress versus ingress flows. Network and communications equipment – Link and device status, or utilization. Fire detection and suppression systems and lighting – Status. Security and access control – Status, RFID or proximity card activity, or CCTV. External influences— Temperature, lightning, or flood. Building management systems—Operational systems state.

Alerts and alarms triggered by certain conditions and business rules - Email, SMS, pager, or IVR. Responses from both human operators and automated systems – Web or IVR. Operational control center overviews, displaying both current and historical states. Integration with other monitoring platforms.

Event Zero addresses the complexity of environmental monitoring. Event Zero supports rolling up metrics across sites for cross-facility overviews, in addition to single cross-site views of environmental monitoring.

In distributed environments, this aggregation capability is a key differentiator between the Event Zero approach and other operational monitoring paradigms.

The diagram below displays a high-level overview of the Event Zero solution, which provides comprehensive functionality for all of the event processing stages: capture, process, and respond.

Device Inputs and Transport Protocols

Event Zero's EPN natively supports a wide variety of input types prevalent in environmental monitoring, for example:

• Monitoring Application specific– VMware ESX, NetCool, Nagios, SolarWinds, DeepMetrix, MRTG, PRTG.
• Authentication– Radius, TACACS, LDAP
• File/File System – CSV, Directory, File attributes (size, dates, existence), Text, XML
• Internet – HTTP POST, HTTP GET, HTTPS, FTP, RSS/Atom, Web Services
• Industrial Automation and Control / Building Management – C-Bus, Dynalite, MOD Bus, Network
  Instruments Data Socket, OPC, PLC, RS232 Serial, RFID, SCADA
• IT Network– DNS, ICMP, NetFlow, NTP, Raw Sockets, SMS, SMTP, SNMP (v1,2.x, 3), Syslog, SyslogNG,
  TCP
• Operating System APIs – Java API, Linux API, Solaris API, Windows DLL 

Devices which implement other protocols can be quickly supported using a flexible Adapter SDK as the foundation for integration.

The Event Zero EPN-based environmental monitoring solution has a number of specific advantages:

• Provides a single view of the ecosystem
• Integrates real-time monitoring with environmental condition histories
• Understands relationships and dependencies between events of both different and related types
• Supports a wide variety of input device and protocol types (manufacturer independent)
• Self-contained solution or network-node based solution.
• Single vendor, single product, end-to-end platform.
• Performance engineered to be highly scalable and resilient.
• Easy to deploy and manage.

The Event Zero solution delivers a single view of environmental monitoring across many sites, using both internal and external data to provide real-time visibility and analysis of significant infrastructure investments

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