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Assuring Quality Performance of the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
- Sensors - Utility Meters
Applicable Industries
- Oil & Gas
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Advanced Metering Infrastructure
- Energy Management System
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
The Challenge
The company was preparing to roll out a new Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to provide more detailed billing for their customers as well as detect degradations and outages, allowing faster response without customers reporting incidents. In addition, the AMI implementation would improve customer service by giving customers access to their usage information online. Armed with own analytics, customers could better understand and control their energy usage for things like heat, air conditioning, appliances and general consumption. In addition, the AMI implementation was key to maintaining the company’s good reputation as outages over a certain magnitude must be reported by federal compliance standards. IT needed to validate their ability to manage the AMI proactively in pre-production to ensure they would not risk internal or customer-facing problems. It was critical to validate the ability to proactively understand if there were problems with data from the smart meters in the AMI not coming through the gateways in the data centers prior to production deployment.
About The Customer
This natural gas and electrical power company serves customers across nearly half of the U.S. states and parts of Canada. In addition to electricity and gas, they also provide many other integrated energy solutions to customers such as pipelines, storage, etc. They are committed to finding better ways to deliver safe, reliable energy to homes and businesses, along with creating a diverse infrastructure, including clean renewable energy. The company is taking advantage of digital transformation to improve the end-user experience, enhance network performance, cut costs, and provide continuous improvement across the business. Their current Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) provides bi-directional communication for over 3 million smart meters, allowing both detailed billing and customer access to detailed energy usage, such as heat and air conditioning costs.
The Solution
In order to validate service assurance capabilities for the critical AMI services prior to production and provide service assurance in production, this energy company deployed additional InfiniStreamNG appliances and an nGenius Packet Flow Switch to their existing nGeniusONE solution. During pre-production testing, the solution instantaneously identified, and alarmed on lost communication to the meters, proving the system would work. When AMI was put into production, the solution continued to provide immediate notification of failures, allowing IT to address them quickly and maintain their Five 9’s internal SLAs on twice-daily meter reads. Typically, the failures were related to AMI communications gateways in the data center. When issues arose, and IT was notified by the nGenius solution, they were able to quickly troubleshoot and re-mesh the system to restore communication. The IT team uses NETSCOUT service dependency mapping to view the full AMI service - from smart metering, to SAP connections, and the backend databases - to fully understand interdependencies and speed troubleshooting.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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