Operating conditions: beyond simple thresholds
Percentage variation, duration, time window, recurrence: useful surveillance looks like a business rule, not a generic BMS alarm.
Octowise Team
A generic BMS alarm (“temperature > 26 °C”) ignores operating context. Useful surveillance looks like a business rule: percentage variation, minimum duration, time window, recurrence, and sometimes several sensors that must deviate together. Octowise lets you compose these operating conditions and connect them to multi-channel alerts: web app, email, and mobile push.
Beyond a simple threshold
A raw threshold fires too early or too late. A 21 °C setpoint exceeded for two minutes at HVAC restart is not the same as a 15% gap that lasts the entire occupied morning. Likewise, a drift outside opening hours may be acceptable, while the same drift during public visiting hours is not.
Octowise conditions encode that nuance: amplitude (value or percentage), persistence over time, time window, and recurrence if the phenomenon must repeat before alerting. The team formalizes what it already considers an incident, instead of living with a BMS default configuration.
- Variation in absolute value or as a percentage versus a reference.
- Minimum duration to ignore start-up transients.
- Time windows aligned with actual building occupancy.
- Recurrence so only phenomena that settle in are raised.
Grouping conditions
Some situations are abnormal only if several signals deviate at once: high indoor temperature and a closed cooling valve, or high electricity use while occupancy is zero. Condition groups prevent false alerts when a single sensor is noisy or poorly calibrated.
It is also a way to document diagnosis. The rule has a business name (“open-space overheating outside occupancy”) rather than a BMS alarm code. When it fires, the team already knows which hypothesis to check.
Operational traceability
Each alert keeps its context: building, source, triggered rule, value history. Post-incident analysis no longer means reconstructing a thread across several tools. Field teams receive critical notifications on the native mobile app, with a link to the relevant record.
The alert timeline distinguishes a resolved incident from recurrence on the same equipment. That is essential to prioritize maintenance: a single alert does not weigh the same as a weekly series on the same AHU.
Surveillance and signatures, two nets
Operating conditions cover what you already know you must watch. Seasonal signatures cover what you have not yet formalized. Together they reduce both silence (undetected drift) and noise (alerts with no possible action).
Octowise’s Surveillance page centralizes these rules per building, with severity and enablement filters, instead of leaving them scattered in each local BMS.