MAJOR TECHNICAL UPDATE – MARCH 2019
Migration to Wattwatchers’ next generation server and API suite is now underway—bringing greater scalability, portability and flexibility to our cloud infrastructure.
This is great news not only for Wattwatchers, but also for our 100+ partners and customers that have integrated with our API since it went live in 2016.
The coming of ‘Mercury’, our 3.0 cloud infrastructure, heralds enhanced functionality for the Wattwatchers ‘Energy Data Hub’ model, our horizontal platform for enabling the monitoring, analysis and control of electrical circuits in real-time via the internet.
Given that a single Wattwatchers device can stream 100,000-plus data points a day to the cloud, we needed to beef up our system to support growth from tens of thousands of our devices in the field, to hundreds of thousands.
Cue Mercury, the faster and more powerful offspring of ‘Jove’ (the in-house codename for our version 2 system.)
*Through machinations long-forgotten in corporate memory, v2 of our API was code-named ‘Jove’ during its development, Jove, also known as Jupiter, is the god of the sky and thunder, and king of the gods in Ancient Roman religion and mythology (and modelled on Zeus, the king of the gods in Ancient Greek mythology). According to mythology, Mercury, sometimes referred to as the Ancient Roman ‘messenger god’, was the son of Jove. Wattwatchers’ Mercury infrastructure builds on a solid, scalable message-based architecture, making the name even more apt.
What does Mercury mean for our customers and partners?
We need to get a bit technical at this stage.
Mercury will progressively add benefits for our cloud integration partners and customers, many of which we know have been on our customers’ wishlists, including:
- Streaming ‘push’ API, in addition to the more traditional RESTful ‘pull’ API.
- Monitoring data and remote control of circuit-level switching through a single unified, and simplified, API. This includes:
- Metadata and device configuration editing and retrieval, including changing CT amperage ratings, channel labels and categories to enable tighter integration with your device enrolment tools.
- Device status information such as communications signal quality, last communicated, and switch state (for capable devices).
- Accessing data from our Modbus-enabled 6M+One devices, allowing integration with NMI pattern-approved billing meters, and soon smart inverters (solar, battery, hybrid.)
- Progressive upgrades to add further features such as calculation of alternate energy units (such as kWh) and Power Factor, via the API.
- Fleet management/orchestration tools (which will be added progressively)
What can you do if you want to learn more about Mercury?
Contact your Wattwatchers account manager, if you are already connected with us, or email us at info@wattwatchers.com.au. We will be arranging Webinar introductions. Further documentation will become available in due course.
FAQs
Q. What about security?
Mercury bolsters Wattwatchers’ commitment to data security and privacy while facilitating access to data by customers and third parties, where such access is approved by customers. As a matter of policy, Wattwatchers limits public discussion about security features, but our team are ready to brief our existing and prospective customers one-to-one, when and as required.
Q. Where is Mercury hosted?
Wattwatchers utilises Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Sydney, Australia, for hosting of the Mercury system. Mercury has been designed to allow portability to AWS in other regions and/or to other cloud services providers (such as Google GCP.) If you have specific jurisdictional data storage or operational requirements, please contact the Wattwatchers team to discuss.
Q. How are electricity flows measured and reported by Wattwatchers? (i.e. What is ‘Short Energy’? What is ‘Long Energy’?)
The combination of how we use ‘Short Energy’ and ‘Long Energy’ is a Wattwatchers proprietary IP solution for communicating voluminous energy data streams. Short Energy is our term for data measurements pushed from Wattwatchers devices to our cloud server, typically at intervals of 30 sec intervals, but other settings can be configured remotely. Long Energy is 5-minute time-and-date-stamped data packages that are logged and retained on the devices for up to 30 days, and pulled from the devices by Mercury and made available via our API. Short Energy data is low-latency, and has a lower deliverability rating. Long Energy has a much stronger deliverability rating (but with a lower frequency and higher time to process/availability).
Q. Will historical data also be available via Mercury?
By default, devices on Mercury will have Long Energy data from 1 Jan 2019 available (or the device install date when installed after 1 Jan 2019). If you have devices with historical data earlier than 1 Jan 2019 that you need available via Mercury, please contact your Wattwatchers account representative to discuss options.
Q. Which devices are supported by Mercury?
All current Wattwatchers device models are supported by Mercury: 6M, 6W, 6W+SW, 6M+One. 3M is also supported. Models with custom configuration (i.e. firmware) are not supported.
