Utility Telemetry Domain

Overview#

A substation relay trips at 3:14 a.m. Before any customer calls arrive, the operations centre already has a critical alarm on screen: a voltage monitor reported an undervoltage condition 90 seconds before the trip, and SCADA telemetry has confirmed zero output from the affected feeder. The on-call engineer acknowledges the alarm, notifies the field crew, and the work order is raised, all within five minutes. That proactive, sensor-driven response is what the Utility Telemetry domain enables.

The domain provides a provider-agnostic telemetry ingestion framework for utility infrastructure monitoring. A pluggable adapter architecture normalises readings and alarms from diverse monitoring sources into a standard format, supporting real-time infrastructure health visibility across electric, water, and gas utilities. All telemetry data is stored in PostgreSQL with multi-tenant organisation isolation.

Key Features#

Multi-Provider Support: Connect to seven provider types including SCADA, smart meter, pressure sensor, voltage monitor, flow meter, temperature sensor, and manual entry through a pluggable adapter architecture.
Standardised Readings: Ingest 22 reading types across electric, water, and gas utilities with quality indicators (good, suspect, bad, stale, manually entered) for data reliability assessment.
Alarm Management: Track 16 alarm types across four severity levels with full lifecycle management including acknowledgement, resolution tracking, and severity-based ordering.
Provider Configuration: Configure and manage connections to telemetry providers with secure credential storage and connection health monitoring.
Batch Ingestion: Support high-throughput data ingestion with batch reading insertion for efficient processing of large telemetry data volumes from multiple sources.
Latest Reading Access: Retrieve the most current reading for each asset and reading type for real-time infrastructure status monitoring.
Alarm Dashboard: View alarm statistics including active, critical, high-priority, warning, and acknowledged alarm counts for operational oversight.

Mermaid Diagram#

Use Cases#

Electric Utilities: Monitor distribution infrastructure health in real time through telemetry readings from SCADA systems, smart meters, and field sensors to detect faults before customers report them.
Water & Gas Utilities: Prioritise and manage infrastructure alarms by severity level with acknowledgement and resolution tracking, ensuring operational accountability for every triggered condition.
Energy Networks: Use telemetry data to detect equipment failures and service disruptions before customer reports arrive, enabling proactive field dispatch and faster restoration.
Asset Management Teams: Analyse telemetry trends over time to identify degrading equipment, plan preventive maintenance, and optimise infrastructure performance across the asset lifecycle.

Integration#

The Utility Telemetry domain supports infrastructure monitoring across the platform:

Utility Infrastructure: Telemetry readings connect to infrastructure assets.
Work Order Management: Alarm conditions can trigger work order creation.
Alert System: Critical alarms feed into the platform notification system.
Analytics: Telemetry trends contribute to operational dashboards.

Open Standards#

OPC Unified Architecture (OPC-UA / IEC 62541): The SCADA adapter connects to OPC-UA REST gateways, mapping OPC-UA node IDs, StatusCode ranges (good/suspect/bad), and the OPC-UA alarm severity scale (1, 1000) to normalised platform readings and alarm severities.
IEC 61968/61970 Common Information Model (CIM): Reading types such as voltage, current, active power, power factor, frequency, consumption (kWh), and demand (kW) align with the IEC CIM measurement and asset model used for electric utility network management.
ANSI C12.22 / IEC 62056 (DLMS/COSEM): The smart meter adapter normalises register data from AMI/AMR head-end systems (Itron, Sensus, Landis+Gyr), mapping metering register types to the platform's standard reading format in line with ANSI C12 and IEC 62056 metering data exchange conventions.
GraphQL: All telemetry queries, mutations (configure provider, insert reading, acknowledge/resolve alarm), and alarm statistics are exposed through a strongly typed GraphQL API.
ISO 8601: All reading timestamps, alarm timestamps, and provider sync metadata are serialised and exchanged as ISO 8601 date-time strings throughout the ingestion pipeline.
OAuth 2.0 Bearer Token (RFC 6750): The SCADA OPC-UA adapter authenticates to provider REST gateways using Bearer tokens in the HTTP Authorization header, following the RFC 6750 token usage specification.
JSON: All provider adapter communications, readings, alarms, and configuration payloads, are exchanged as JSON, the universal wire format across every supported telemetry provider type.

Last Reviewed: 2026-02-24 Last Updated: 2026-04-14