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Advertisement Here’s the rub — manufacturing today runs on data and networks as much as it does on raw materials and machines. Without rock-solid uptime and timely monitoring, even milliseconds of delay can lead to downtime, loss of production and missed delivery deadlines. I’ve been doing this since 1993 and started as network admin pre-big-PSTNs, so I like to say that nothing else matters if your network isn’t humming.
It’s not a quantity thing, it is about quality and the reputation we have built, says Nelson Acosta, founder and co-owner of PJ Networks. In the last six months, we have helped three clients in manufacturing – leaders in their fields – enhance their network operations centers (NOC) and cyber security posture. The results? They shattered the industry standard of uptime, slashed incidents by nearly 50%, and they saved themselves some cold, hard cash in the process.
This PJ Networks case study tells you how we made it happen – from SNMPv3 integrations to custom Zabbix dashboards – backed by data and its data-driven evidence that proactive monitoring in manufacturing is far more than filler words. It’s a lifeline.
Let me present the cast: Three large Indian manufacturing companies, with huge state of the art facilities, vast industrial networks which held just about everything, SCADA, IoT sensors, ERP links and even some voice/data mux devices (yes, some were still on PSTN heritage, fascinates me every time). But there’s a catch: frequent shutdowns of the network and more than once-insufficient uptime interrupted their production schedule.
Challenges included:
One customer, whom we’ll call “Alpha Manufacturing”, saw quarterly uptime of 97.5%, meaning thousands of minutes of lost production. Unacceptable for plants operating on a just-in-time inventory basis.
Here’s where we got our hands dirty. We built here a custom NOC suite that included best of breed cybersecurity frameworks but married to industry leading monitoring tools. Not only watching the network, but guessing trouble before it hit.
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is old, I know – but security wise it depends on the version. Many vendors still dabble in SNMPv1 or v2s, and that’s like leaving your factory doors open. We require SNMPv3, for two reasons: It includes message integrity, authentication, and encryption — which are critical in today’s world.
We then setup SNMPv3 across all of the network gear: switches, routers, IoT end points, and multiplexers. This locked down device communications tightly, intercepting that at any point to stop unauthorized access – yet without impeding operations.
It is a shame, for Zabbix is a Godzilla of monitoring and an industrial network will make a nuke test within weeks to your Zabbix. Industrial environments have their own specific KPIs and protocol quirks – things like Modbus TCP devices and OPC UA servers and PLC health stats need to be presented in specific templates for the info to make sense.
So we created fingered Zabbix templates which:
Our dashboards presented plant managers and network teams with a panoramic view – all relevant information visible at a glance, colour-coded and actionable.
Late alerts are a bit like screaming after the firetruck has pulled away. We built in active real-time alerting with built-in escalation policies to guarantee: alerts are sent to the first people who need to be made aware, scaling if a problem cannot be fixed, and providing information to troubleshoot problems quickly. We tied it into mobile apps, into email, into SMS, because if you don’t get your alert until the next day, it’s already too late.
The transition didn’t happen overnight.
Along the way, we collaborated closely with our plant IT and operations teams to ensure we didn’t interrupt business during factory hours — downtime is, after all, the enemy. Overall, the cycle was around a two month span, accounting for full NOC rollout as well as ongoing managed services support.
This is the part that makes me really excited. The contrast was like night and day. The manufacturers saw significant improvements:
According to Satish Rao, CIO of Alpha Manufacturing, “When PJ Networks was up and running in our plant, our plant was changed (for the good), forever. Moving to 99.9% uptime seemed like a magic bullet. Their NOC team not only watched our network, but they understood our manufacturing pulse. The unknown is no longer a mystery to us, real-time alerts put us in front every time.
Some unsolicited advice from my desk to yours, if you’re running manufacturing ops and reading this:
Oh, but a quick side note — password policies. Seriously, terrible password habits still run large in industrial networks. There’s more to security than just fixing vulnerabilities. If your devices have weak credentials, patching isn’t going to save you. I don’t care if you think two-factor is a pain in the neck — it’s better than having Chinese hoaxes played over your factory floor because some cracker found your default password.
So. So if you need to fine-tune your networks like a Swiss timepiece, PN Networks is here to help you take it to the next level — with PN’s managed NOC services, industrial-strength cybersecurity and referenceable installs. We have decades of knowledge from the start of PSTN datacom to current zero trust bank deployments all in solutions optimized for manufacturing spaces.
Want to nail 99.9% uptime? Want to slash your incident count in almost half? Looking to simplify monitoring while reducing operating costs? It’s all achievable — and no, it doesn’t require a magic AI-powered black box. Decidedly old-school know-how, with new-school tools.
Shoot us a message. Let’s start with an audit. Then coffee number four.
A final observation: Manufacturing plants are industrial fortresses, and they must be able to withstand cyberattacks and suffer operational failures. Treat their network ops as a strategic asset — because when it goes down, so does everything else.
