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An introduction to Monitoring Fundamentals strictly from the perspective of telecom network alarm management.
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Reserve Your Seat TodayThe ISO Public Protection Classification program measures the effectiveness of community fire protection services. They give a rating to each community, 1 through 10, 1 being maximally prepared, and 10 being minimally prepared.
ISO then provides this information to insurance agencies to help them determine your community's risk and, therefore, insurance rates. As your community's iso rating goes down, so do your insurance rates, and you can feel safer knowing that your community is better prepared in the event of a fire.
Understanding the Fire Suppression Rating Schedule
All communities have fire stations, trucks, and hydrants, so what does the ISO measure to make your insurance rates go up and down?
They look at the community's support services to determine emergency preparedness. They examine dispatching and emergency response times, the support tools that maximize the effectiveness of fire prevention services.
For example, the ISO rewards an up-to 1.5 point drop in your PPC rating for properly monitoring the community's dispatch circuit. If you make sure your community can always get a hold of its first responders quickly, you're less likely to suffer catastrophic fire damage, lowering your premiums and, more importantly, making you safer.
Network Monitoring: a Cheap, Effective Solution for Every Community.
While you could build additional costly fire stations and staff them, without a reliable dispatch system, they won't know when there's a problem or where to go to fix it. A monitored dispatch solution provides a cheap alternative that increases the effectiveness and readiness of existing fire-prevention resources. If your trucks and firemen know when there's a fire and where to go to put it out, they'll be able to do their job quicker and more effectively. It's a far greater return on investment.
Monitoring radio sites and other emergency resources, keeping generators on hand that automatically kick-in during power failures, so emergency services are always on-line: these are the things that will make your community safe and lower your insurance premiums.
To that end, installing small remote monitoring units like the NetGuardian LT at radio sites can help you measure connectivity, power, unauthorized entry, the amount of fuel left in remote generators, and other things that you might worry about at remote sites. They can even notify technicians in the event of a problem by voiced telephone call or email. With a couple of controls at your sites, you can switch on backup transmitters and generators automatically in the event of network failures. Having these remote units installed at your sites can ensure the readiness of your dispatch network.
In your emergency operations center, you can place T/Mon, a network management master, to collect all of the data from your remote sites. From the master, you can monitor all of your sites on one screen. T/Mon provides you with a map-based graphical interface too, so you can see all of the alarms in the city or zoom in to the floor plan at any particular site. Your emergency personnel can even remote into the T/Mon so they don't have to be at the site to know exactly what's going on. This way, your emergency monitoring personnel will never miss a problem.
For more information on network monitoring basics and remote telemetry devices from DPS Telecom that can help in your community, see:
