The context

Municipal infrastructure operations — water treatment, waste management, energy distribution, public buildings — share a common characteristic with industrial operations: dense sensor coverage, historian data, and threshold-based alarm systems that were configured for safety compliance rather than operational intelligence.

A software platform serving municipalities had built significant data collection and visualisation capabilities on top of this sensor infrastructure. The gap was analysis: they could show operators what was happening in the data, but they could not tell them what was about to happen, or what historical patterns suggested would happen next.

The integration

Data from the municipal systems was already being collected via Telegraf, which has native plugins for OPC-UA, Modbus, and the protocols common in building management and public infrastructure systems. Eyer was connected to the existing Telegraf data flow — no new sensors, no changes to existing infrastructure, no direct access to control systems or PLCs.

Eyer built operational fingerprints for the monitored assets: water pumps, treatment plant systems, HVAC infrastructure, and energy metering points. Each fingerprint captures the learned normal behaviour of that specific asset in that specific operating context.

What the analysis found

Across the monitored assets, Eyer identified several classes of anomaly patterns that the existing threshold-based system had not been detecting. Pump efficiency degradation patterns — gradual changes in the relationship between flow, pressure, and energy consumption that were statistically significant but had not crossed any individual alarm threshold. HVAC deviation patterns that correlated with downstream temperature complaints before those complaints were logged. Water treatment chemistry drift patterns that appeared hours before quality measurements moved into alarm territory.

The value for public sector operations

Public sector infrastructure operations face the same operational challenges as commercial industrial operations, with an additional dimension: public accountability and regulatory reporting requirements. The operational audit trail that Eyer produces — timestamped, contextualised, asset-level — is increasingly relevant to compliance reporting and to demonstrating responsible asset management to oversight bodies.

Early detection of developing infrastructure issues has direct public value: a water treatment anomaly caught two hours early is two hours before a potential quality event reaches consumers. An HVAC deviation caught in time is a building that stays at the right temperature rather than one that generates complaints and emergency call-outs.