I am wondering if anyone has actual experience with a solution that is more
easily scalable but not amazingly expensive compared to what I'm doing now...
I've been using the APC Netbotz 355 to monitor our IDFs for temperature and
motion. I like that unit because it is pretty customizable w.r.t. how much
noise I want it to make and where it sends that noise. When its camera detects
motion, it includes a few of the still images in the E-mail alert that it sends
out, and that's often sufficient to recognize who is in the room and why
they're in there. At about $1200, it's a pretty decent unit.
Now that I have a pilot rollout of four of them in various buildings, I'm
starting to wonder if there's a more scalable and easily maintainable solution.
The issues I'm running in to are:
1) About once every couple months, one of the four will claim that its
(built-in) camera or its (built-in) air sensor pod has been disconnected. I'm
not sure how this can (reasonably) happen. In most cases, the problem resolves
itself or I do a reboot of the unit. In one case, I've had to wipe the unit
back to factory state and start over.
2) Any configuration change requires contacting every unit individually.
Sure, I can do it remotely, but there's no global way to push out a change
across all the units.
3) APC doesn't make it easy to manually find firmware or client software
("Advanced View") updates, so it's hard for me to be certain that I'm on the
latest version. Recently, their support folks told me to upgrade to the latest
firmware, which was older than the firmware that Advanced View claimed it was
getting from APC's web site.
My concern is that if I do go ahead with putting one device in each of our 70+
IDFs throughout our campus, the minor annoyances that I'm seeing now will scale
up to a level that could consume an entire part-time employee.
===
Jeremy Charles
Epic - Computer and Technology Services Division
[email protected]
Phone: 608-271-9000 Fax: 608-271-7237
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