Dartmouth College’s Technology Services team is unique. It consists of both OT network and facilities experts dedicated to ensuring the smooth operation of building automation systems (BAS) across the campus—a 269-acre sprawling location, with some buildings over 200 years old. With this kind of mixed building, retrofits and renovations often bring together a wide array of vendors and systems. Making them all work together can be a complex challenge.
Douglas Plumley, the team’s Software Architect, realized they needed better in-house tools to tackle the problem and end the finger-pointing. Specifically, he saw the need for a powerful solution to troubleshoot BACnet issues.
The Challenge of Anonymous Hall
One of the Technology Services team’s biggest challenges grew from a major capital project: the gut renovation of the new Anonymous Hall. The renovation was a huge undertaking and revealed a critical need within the facility team. Specifically, integrations between various vendor systems, lighting and occupancy, were failing, and no one onsite had a clear answer as to why.
As Doug explains, it came down to a gap in BACnet visibility. “IP? We’re great at that,” Douglas said. “But we need[ed] to get familiar with this protocol called BACnet. We had to do packet captures, analyze them, and figure out what was going on!”
How OptigoVN Delivered the Solution
The Dartmouth team was first onboarded with Visual BACnet, then upgraded to Optigo Visual Networks (OptigoVN)—Optigo Networks’ advanced OT network monitoring and troubleshooting solution. The advanced suite of diagnostic tools was put to work on packet captures from Anonymous Hall’s BAS, revealing the source of the issue was not limited to Anonymous Hall, but the design of the OT network itself.
“Right away, we were seeing issues we weren’t even aware of,” Douglas explains. It allowed them to prioritize getting the entire network reconfigured, reconnected, and optimized. “We started by focusing on things that were broken. Things people were complaining about. For us, the big ones initially were clamping down the number of broadcast messages and trying to make the networks quieter.”
Optigo Networks’ diagnostic tools were able to pinpoint problems down to individual devices, saving time that had previously been spent manually diagnosing issues. Before deploying OptigoVN, Doug says, “We’d have our team mobilizing, getting a ladder, going up into ceiling tiles, and unplugging hubs because there were so many messages.”
Douglas added, “If we’d started implementing [OptigoVN] a year or two before we did, and were actually actioning the insights out of it, we would’ve had a network that was reliable enough that integrations would work. And when things weren’t working, we could just troubleshoot them instead of buying that $24,000 controller. I have examples where we did buy that $24,000 controller, and it didn’t fix the issue.”
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Fixing the Flood in Webster Hall
In Webster Hall, an issue stemmed from one of the MS/TP networks still in service. Optigo Networks’ solutions served as the source of truth (or the “hammer” as Douglas referred to it) that revealed a programming issue causing excessive Who-Has messages to flood the network and impede the controllers from passing tokens throughout the network.
Douglas’ team was able to give clear instructions to their vendors on what to zero in on, and which devices to move to a new VLAN, finally resolving the problem. “We quickly realized that something like eight devices were responsible for over 50% of all the BACnet traffic on our network. We were essentially DDoS’ing ourselves with unscoped WHO-IS requests, forcing 1000+ devices to respond, times eight!”
Transform Your OT Network with OptigoVN
Since adopting OptigoVN, Douglas sums up Dartmouth’s experience as setting a new standard. “In my opinion, a large campus like Dartmouth needs to have an OT network monitoring resource internally. Now, we can make sure these issues don’t happen again. We can look at leadership and say, we have removed a lot of risk from the environment. And that’s really empowering.”
With Optigo Visual Networks, client OT network monitoring and troubleshooting just got easier. To find out for yourself, click here to request a demo, or create your free account and start exploring today.
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