Systems Integrators do best when they can provide customer support for the entire OT network. Not only are they a client’s partner for network planning, installation, and maintenance, but they also provide them with hardware sales. Keeping a client within a hardware ecosystem you know and trust can have a big impact on future support and upgrades. Just knowing what’s in a client’s system—when it was installed, and how it’s supported by the manufacturer—is a big advantage when it comes to ongoing support and maintenance.
And on the business end, including hardware sales as part of your client relationship just makes sense:
- It’s higher profitability, as hardware margins often flow from services and system design. Selling the hardware allows SIs to provide more comprehensive, high-performing solutions. By offering updated, compatible devices, they can ensure the overall reliability and performance of a customer’s system.
- Selling the hardware also strengthens relationships with customers by demonstrating that the SI is invested in providing cutting-edge, long-term solutions. This leads to repeat business, as customers are more likely to trust and rely on an integrator who proactively addresses system needs and improvements.
- In the fast-evolving technology landscape, upgrading hardware also future-proofs customer systems, making them more adaptable to new standards or expansions, which is beneficial for both the customer and the integrator.
In short, selling hardware to your customers is a net positive for everyone. So how do you encourage customers to break into their budgets for upgrades and replacements? Leveraging OptigoVN is a great way to bring data-based proof to your customers when it comes time to make recommendations.
Let’s look at how you can use OptigoVN in a few different ways—from diagnostic results to device inventory—to make informed recommendations that keep your clients’ networks running smoothly, and your revenue streams optimized.
OptigoVN’s Diagnostics Are a First Flag
OptigoVN’s suite of diagnostic tools is going to be some of the detailed BACnet diagnostics and advanced insights you’ll get into the life of your hardware. Matching patterns of results with OptigoVN’s results timeline can help you chart that performance over time, and get a head start on identifying and recommending replacements before they give up the ghost.
Diagnostic results can also give you an edge in recommending additional hardware, too. Sometimes the solution isn’t a replacement, but an additional device to handle changing demands on your network.
Let’s start by looking at the results from several key diagnostics you can use to aid in recommending new hardware sales to your customers.
Slow Response Times
Aging devices can be a serious hamper on network performance. In particular, they become bottlenecks to overall throughput—as their older components lack support for more modern features, and simply cannot keep up with demands for more and faster data. Every other device along the line is forced to wait for the next packet it processes. That slowdown cascades out from that subnet to connected subnets, out to the network as a whole.
This is where OptigoVN can add insight into capacity and network upgrades for SIs. With diagnostics, like the aptly named Slow Response Time, you can flag hardware with chronically slow communication speeds. With OptigoVN’s Site Scopes, you can drill down to identify the path between the requesting and responding device for each slow response time, allowing you to investigate further and recommend replacement hardware when necessary.
The key is finding the repeat offenders. Devices can have the occasional processor glitch or slowdown for any number of reasons, but OptigoVN users can look back in time to past test results and identify the pattern of slow responses by the same devices. That kind of root cause analysis adds serious value and trust to your customer relationships, and gives you the empirical data to support hardware sales confidently.
Unresponsive Devices
A device that’s expected to be online but no longer responding to any Who-is/I-am requests is probably not long for this world. But tracking down the expiring device isn’t always that easy. Traditionally, you’d need to manually begin splitting networks to narrow down your list of non-responders, but ultimately it’s up a ladder to test and inspect each one.
But with OptigoVN, all that testing is baked in. Within seconds, the diagnostic suite can give you several results to help you pinpoint the issue. If you’ve received an error message about fully unreachable devices or lost tokens, there’s a good chance you need a replacement.
While you’ll still want to confirm it isn’t a wiring issue, having OptigoVN’s Site Scopes identify every non-responding device saves you hours of hunting around in ceilings or behind wall panels testing for the bad device. It’s a huge time saver, both for you and your customer. With remote access to OptigoVN, you’ll be able to identify the device type and be ready with a replacement before leaving your office.
Seeing an unacknowledged request error? You’ve likely found a device with a communications issue, like a loose or damaged cable. In this case, it’s possibly an easy fix, and you’ve just saved your client the cost of a new device they didn’t need. Good job!
Excessive Broadcast By Source
Too many broadcast messages, too often, can lead to trouble. While it’s common to see a lot of broadcast packets between BACnet devices, without managing device broadcast frequency, they can become overwhelming to the network as each device must process every broadcast message.
Tip: Consider a novel approach to managing BACnet broadcast messages: Doubling your BBMDs per subnet to create a split-horizon design.
Excessive Number of Devices
This one is of particular importance for MS/TP networks. While it’s common knowledge that MS/TP networks can in theory support up to 127 devices, in practice, it’s not recommended to create any MS/TP networks with more than 25-30 devices in your chain. Any more creates too much computing strain on the low-powered hardware.
We created the Excessive Number of Devices on Single MSTP Network diagnostic result specifically to alert you to MS/TP segments with more than 32 devices connected. At that point, it’s a good idea to recommend adding a router to split and create two networks that can share the load.
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Be a Detective with Device Details
Diagnostics are a powerful way to get deep insights into the overall health of your network, as well as individual devices. But there’s also another feature in OptigoVN that can help you determine when it’s time to recommend hardware sales in the form of upgrades and replacements: the device details.
OptigoVN’s detailed device inventory list includes some key points about each piece of equipment right in the app. Here’s a list of some things to look out for that could help you in determining when it’s time to suggest upgrades:
- Lack of support for modern services. A lot of older hardware devices struggle because they cannot support newer features to help handle increased traffic. Here’s a few details to look for:
- Subscribe/Confirm COV. Older devices don’t support this feature which greatly reduces the need for global broadcasts. TIP: seeing a lot of messages using unconfirmed COV? Change those to a subscribe/confirm COV req (and if you can’t, time for an upgrade!).
- Number of devices that can be subscribed. BACnet devices support a maximum number of COV subscriptions, and older hardware simply doesn’t support enough anymore. Upgrade to a device that supports more.
- Does your device support “Read Property Multiple” requests? Again, this helps cut down on the amount of traffic packets that need to be sent. Upgrade to hardware that supports sending multiple read properties in one message.
- Does your hardware support packet segmentation? Dividing a data packet into smaller units can be a huge help on unreliable and busy networks.
- Cut down on devices doing double duty. It’s best practice to keep devices dedicated to just one task to increase speed and resiliency. For example, look for devices like routers that are configured to act as BBMDs, and assign each service to its dedicated hardware: one for routing and one to act as a BBMD.
- Unconfigured/Faulty Devices. Seeing instances of devices identifying as device ID 4194303 where previously they were not? This behavior can signal that a device is malfunctioning or glitching, and needs replacement.
- Say goodbye to MS/TP. It’s 202X. It’s time to recommend replacing legacy MS/TP prone to common faults devices with modern equipment that supports all the features we’ve mentioned and runs on the far more capable BACnet/IP protocol. Use Optigo’s device inventory to quickly create a list of hardware to batch upgrade.
Not Dead Yet (Just Old)
As with all things preventative maintenance, it’s not ideal to wait until failure to replace aging devices. Remember, it’s always going to be easier and cheaper to fix a small issue before it becomes an emergency.
To that end, several diagnostic results in OptigoVN can help you flag devices that are showing telltale signs of running out the clock, allowing you to surface it to your clients early and make spending recommendations now, rather than in a crisis.
Busy router backpressure
This means one or more of your BACnet routers can’t process any more incoming messages. It’s likely struggling to keep up with the traffic.
Overloaded routers can lead to a variety of network issues, including congestion, latency, data loss, and overall performance degradation.
Router rejecting network messages
This means that a router on your network isn’t forwarding or passing on certain messages, data packets, or communication requests. This can be caused by resource overload and potential failure.
These types of errors can lead to data loss, communication breakdown, operational errors, congestion, and stability issues.
Excessive token hold time
This error means that an MS/TP device on your network is running out of time to finish communicating messages before the token moves along. It can suggest the device is simply unable to keep up with the traffic load.
The result can be network congestion and delayed messages.
Partially unreachable devices
This means one or more devices on your network have not responded to at least one of the Who-Is requests with an I-Am response during the capture. Unlike fully unreachable devices, partially unreachable devices respond sporadically. This can be an indicator of device overload and potential failure.
Using OptigoVN’s powerful diagnostics and device inventory not only helps improve network performance, but as you can see, it also opens up opportunities for increased hardware sales. OptigoVN provides systems integrators with the diagnostic tools and insights they need to identify aging, faulty, or underperforming hardware, making it easier to recommend hardware sales to their customers. By leveraging OptigoVN, integrators can confidently offer long-term, high-performing solutions that keep customers’ systems running smoothly.
Ready to see how OptigoVN can boost your hardware sales and network diagnostics? Schedule a demo or sign up for a free at www.optigo.net.
