IoT Monitoring: Hot New Technology Sector

A hot new technology sector is attracting ICT entrepreneurs and investors in Europe and around the world: tools to secure, monitor and test applications that run on the Internet of Things (IoT). Why?

As embedded IoT networks connect a growing range of things including appliances, vending machines, fitness trackers, industrial gateways and connected cars, global spending and dependence on IoT will rise, according to research firm IDC, from $800 billion in 2017 to $1.4 trillion by 2021.  

For example, the transportation industry is using IoT sensors to improve fuel usage in planes and trucks. Sensors for humidity and CO2 are reducing building energy costs. Smart shelves and digital signage are driving sales in brick-and-mortar stores. The infrastructures, hardware platforms and application frameworks that drive these applications are becoming more complex.

Therefore, IoT system operators need tools that provide end to end visibility—to ensure that their devices and network connectivity are up and running. Monitoring tools also facilitate tagging and tracing the pathways and congestion of IoT transactions, from connected devices to data centers to network equipment to databases. This new class of systems catches alerts and ensures that errors are handled using minimal overhead, memory, computing power and network bandwidth. They provide centralized, web-based dashboards that allow IoT users to apply automated rules and triggers for alerts based on preset thresholds.

However, these new monitoring tools create additional complexities for ICT professionals and CIOs.  These new systems require the versatility to handle data generated by a wide variety of configurations and across a myriad of vertical markets. These range from industrial gateways to micro-controller-based devices in smart homes to microprocessor-based devices in connected cars to set-top boxes that generate data about video users and ads displayed. Tools must monitor both connected products that are designed for networks along with others that are homegrown and rely heavily on customization.

New tools to meet these needs have been emerging in Europe in the past few years.  For example, European IoT monitoring system maker relayr is a rapidly-growing German IoT company whose products provide protocol-agnostic IoT middleware for device management.

Managing the Internet of Things is a major challenge for ICT executives and network administrators. Platforms and tools to monitor the availability and performance of infrastructure and applications in real-time will ultimately enable IoT applications to become fully interactive. Expect to see more players enter this fast-growing technology sector.