Rajant’s customers have been using our network management tool, BC|Commander, for years. It’s a great tool for seeing what a mesh network is doing right now. For example, what does the RF environment currently look like? Or, which nodes are meshed to which other nodes? Because it is so focused on the present, Rajant provides another tool that gives a view into the network over time.
Unlike BC|Commander, BC|Enterprise is installed on a server and is always on and always watching the mesh and gathering data. Because it’s hosted locally, none of your data ever leaves your network for “the cloud”.
BC|Enterprise is a web-accessible application that provides both historical and real-time graphs of any aspect of a Rajant Kinetic Mesh® network. You can view data for individual nodes or you can aggregate it for groups of nodes, such as trucks or shovels, or a specific loading dock or a specific drilling site. You can query it for any time period, like, “What was happening on the mesh last Tuesday?”, “…last March?” or “…15 minutes ago?” This is provided through a number of customizable dashboards. BC|Enterprise’s default dashboards graph the data we have determined to be most useful to network managers after years of experience providing support services.
This kind of information is incredibly useful on large networks with many applications running on them. For example, if your users tell you that they are seeing issues with a video monitoring application, you can look at the graphs to determine what’s happening. Maybe you’ll see considerably more traffic entering the mesh from your LAN than you expect. You can then go back in time in the graphs and see when that traffic increased, which will help you to identify the cause – maybe a new system was brought up yesterday and that correlates with the traffic increase. Once you have the root cause identified, you can begin working towards a solution, such as adding capacity to your network or dealing with a troublesome device or application.
BC|Enterprise helps you to identify and address potential issues before they impact your users, and to maximize the use and value of your Kinetic Mesh network. Together, BC|Commander and BC|Enterprise provide a complete mesh management and monitoring solution.