Beer Taps, Deep Fryers And BBQ Smokers: 5 Unique Ways MSPs Are Using LogicMonitor To Enable IoT

Pushing The IoT Envelope

LogicMonitor has been pleasantly surprised at the unique ways its channel partners are using its SaaS-based performance monitoring platform to drive net new Internet of Things sales.

"We're beginning to see very creative usage of LogicMonitor. There's an emerging IoT story with our platform," said David Powell, general manager of LogicMonitor's service provider business. "We're an infrastructure monitoring platform, but if you abstract that out by one layer, we catch data and render it beautifully in a dashboard and correlate it to other forms of data ... MSPs keep pushing the envelope around, 'Hey can we monitor this?' Can we monitor that?'"

With the ability to monitor both legacy and new technologies either on-premise or in the cloud through a single platform, LogicMonitor is expanding the universe of what MSPs can do for customers.

Fast Food

By leveraging LogicMonitor, one fast food chain is now able to prevent maintenance problems in the kitchen.

"They wrote a data source for the customers deep fryers and refrigerators and now they're correlating that data back so they can predict when parts are going to fail in their deep fryers and refrigerators," said Powell.

"Let's say after 100,000 hours of use, this belt on the fridge tends to break. So instead of waiting for it to break and suddenly your foods goes to waste and you start losing money, what if you could monitor the hours of usage and know that at 95,000 hours – you go and proactively change the belt so you don’t have to wait for it to break," said Powell. "But you don’t know if the belt breaks at 100,000 hours unless you can see all of the refrigerators, which is what we can do."

Ferries

Another unique LogicMonitor IoT use case revolves around ferry transportation and ticketing gates.

"There's a ferry company that's using us to monitor where their ferries are and render them on a map to see where the ferry is moving and also to monitor the ticketing turnstile," said Powell. "The reason for that is to solve business problems. What is the business problem? Some people tend to think, 'We'll something's down,' but the real business problem is, 'We can't deep fry or refrigerate our chicken.' Or, 'When is the next ferry coming in so we can update the wait time.'"

Beer Taps

An MSP once placed Wi-Fi enabled flow meters on all the craft beer lines during an LogicMonitor sponsored event.

"There were Wi-Fi-enabled flow meters on all the craft beer lines and then they wrote a data source on LogicMonitor. We had a big screen showing the beer consumption by type of beer because it was using the flow meters," said Powell. "That's an IoT application and a great use case."

Trucks

One transportation customer used LogicMonitor to monitor trucks to capture data in real-time in order to predict when a part would break.

"They wanted to catch the data from these little onboard computers inside the truck and aggregate it back and compare trucks to other trucks out there to begin to predict when a part was going to fail. So you can call ahead and order a new part and have it at the depo already, so when that part does fail, they can proactively repair it quickly," said Powell. "They can render all the truck's data side by side."

BBQ Smokers

Some customers have used LogicMonitor to monitor the temperature of its BBQ smokers.

"The idea is that you've got streams of data and those streams of data hit LogicMonitor and we render it beautifully," said Powell. "These smokers are hugely important to them, so again, we're solving a real business problem for the customer."