Monitoring of satellite communications infrastructure focused on vessels

At Muutech we offer much more than just a monitoring platform based on Zabbix and Grafana, but as our name suggests “monitoring solutions”. When we contacted Syntelix, a company specialized in land and sea satellite communication solutions, they had a problem: they had several heterogeneous monitoring solutions with their different satellite networks, based on old technologies, but they did not solve the problem they had: being able to measure and monitor in real-time and in a unified way the use their customers made of their technology.

The problem with traditional solutions is that they always require direct connectivity to the equipment. In this case, the equipment (switches, routers, modems, servers, etc.), is embarked on fishing and leisure vessels where there is no public IP or common VPN infrastructure, as they also work as different suppliers. To solve this problem, we proposed the installation of a Muubox on the ships. This equipment, which would be hardware in the case of boats without servers installed and a software image otherwise, allows solving the initial problem as it collects the data locally and sends it to the Muutech cloud monitoring platform. This device has an additional advantage of great value in this scenario and is that, in a moving environment and in often-complicated conditions, the Internet connection is very unstable and with latencies that can reach the second, and the Muubox allows the temporary storage of data in times of poor or no connection for later forwarding to the platform.

We began to deploy the device on different boats, and Syntelix was able to do so progressively, thanks to the pay-per-use model:

“The tool has provided us with visibility to remote stations that previously remained opaque when it came to dealing with service incidents. This has improved our ability to diagnose and solve problems, which has translated into a better user experience for our customers. Where we used to have to ask the crew to read the devices, we can now access that data directly and easily,” said Carlos Derqui, CEO of Syntelix.

Having visibility into your service and infrastructure is key, especially when the availability of technical remote hands is very limited and you have a customer as demanding as a person who works onboard and wants to communicate with his family or watch a movie in his relaxing time.
Having solved the main problem, in Syntelix they have started to use advanced functionalities of the platform, which allow them to be more agile and fast when using the data to improve or give new services to their own clients:

We are using the platform’s API to get rich data from the vessels. This functionality, in addition to contributing to troubleshooting by allowing us to compare the position with the satellite coverage footprint, allows us to deliver fleet control, route tracking, weather forecasting and many other functionalities to our customers. Yours is not the only technology we use for this purpose, but it is certainly the easiest to manage for the operations and development team,” says Carlos.

Looking to the future, they want to continue using the advanced functionalities of the platform to further improve their operations and customer service, but also to transfer data on usage and quality of service, conveniently adapted to a non-technical language, to end-users as part of their Internet access services.

This success story perfectly illustrates how our platform can firstly solve, in a simple and effective way, monitoring and visibility problems, and then become a platform that can feed other developments or help other departments, solving problems at different levels and allowing to offer new and improved services to customers.