Visual BACnet Monitoring: How it works

1. Visual BACnet Site

Within Visual BACnet, hosted on the Optigo cloud, users can set up a site. The Optigo team will then activate the site to be a monitored site. Each site has a unique API key associated with it.

2. Capture Tool

Optigo Networks has a free Windows Capture tool. It can be installed on any Windows device, and can capture pcap files, similar to how Wireshark captures files. The tool can be installed on any Windows machine, and captures can be scheduled at regular intervals. The capture tool requires an outbound internet connection to port 443.

You can also purchase Optigo's Visual BACnet Capture Tools for IP or MS/TP networks. Learn more. 

Optigo Networks recommends capturing every hour for the full hour, for a total of 24 captures per day.

3. API Key

During setup, you will need to input the API key from your unique site into the Capture Tool. Each capture location should have a unique site: this will ensure the information being trended is consistently from the same location.

4. Monitor

Once it’s all set up, the Capture Tool will capture at the interval you specified, upload the file to Visual BACnet, and trend it. The graph will show the network health changes over time, and you can drill down into each individual file to diagnose specific problems (duplicate device IDs, circular networks, etc.).

5. Alert

Alerts are automatically set to be sent to the account holder’s email when the network health drops below 50%, or changes (+ or -) by more than 10 points. These thresholds can be changed to suit your needs.