 Welcome everyone to the TruePath Technologies web series called TruePath Cool Tools. You can see that beautiful logo right there. Thank you participants for joining us live, and thanks to our viewers who are joining us on demand. I'm Jamie Scott-Octahias, CEO of JSA, and it's my honor to introduce you to our presenter today, our demo, our host, my friend Douglas Morrow. He is the founder of TruePath Technologies. Hi everyone. Hi Jamie. So, just a quick note about TruePath Technologies. They are the leaders in cutting-edge IT software services. They specialize in in-house services for new or existing IT monitoring software. So, this is their bag, if you will. The leaders here, we have them today. You can see all the beautiful logos of their clients on this slide here. You all can see my slides, yeah? Okay, and remember this easy-to-use web-based portal software provides bandwidth and line quality monitoring and reporting. Douglas specifically, not just the founder of TruePath Technologies. He's also a senior engineer. He brings 20 years of expertise and is a published author, we should mention. He wrote the book, the O'Reilly book, that is, on SNMP. So, if you, the essential SNMP. So, absolutely still, Amazon's number one selling network management book, and it's now in its second edition. So, definitely something to check on, Amazon.com. And so, this webinar series is really giving us a peek into what does the company on software monitoring use to, what are the tools they use in-house every day to make their business better and faster and greater than it already is. So, with that, today's showcase, if you will, is HW Group. Can you tell us a little bit, Douglas, about HW? I sure can. So, thanks, Jamie. As you know, at TruePath, we specialize in hardware software monitoring tools. We really want to be that single shop for all your monitoring needs. We don't do the monitoring ourselves or have a network operation center. We set things up so that our customers have the tool set up and configured properly. So, we've been around for a little over 11 years, and in the beginning, we obviously saw a need, and customers saw a need for facilities-based monitoring. Facilities-based monitoring can be seen as like data center, humidity, temperature, water detection, security, door access, and things like that. And we really fell into a great relationship, a great partnership with HW Group, hardware group. And based out of Czech and a great team and a great set of products. And so, what we're going to be doing today is just showcasing a few of their products. Now, the good and the bad of HW Group is they have a lot of products, right? Which is more good than bad, but when we start talking about figuring out which one to use, that's sort of where TruePath can come in because we can help sort of identify which products you should use. So, we're going to get into, again, we're going to talk about today. I'm going to tilt the camera down and talk a little bit about the IP Watchdog Lite. I'm going to talk about some water sensors and FTE2. We've got a Poseidon 230-266, and all these names mean absolutely nothing to anybody, right? So, let me go ahead. I'm going to share my screen, and I'm going to start showing the product map here. So, hopefully you can see my screen, okay? We've got your URL up. Good. So, what I want to do is this is HW Group's web page under Devices, and this is just going to give you a good example of sort of how many products that they have out there. And they're really broken up into three different products. The Monitoring Set, IP Serial, and Access Type products. We're going to concentrate just on the monitoring side today, if you can imagine. But we've used all their product lines. And I do want to say one thing as I move forward is that these are really industrial-grade devices. These are not your cheap, easily broken kind of devices. We've been partners with these guys for, I think, we're up to seven years now. And we get maybe one or two returns a year. And quite frankly, a lot of those are just configured on, and we reflash them, and they're absolutely fine. So, when people call up and say, hey, you know, are these going to be reliable? Can I bet my sort of business on it? And the answer is yes, 100%. These are really great products, not just from a hardware physical side, but also from a software resiliency side. So, here you can see the products map. They have what's called, people say, well, how do you pronounce it? It's the Democles. So, their Democles line. They have their Aries line. They have their S-T-E line. And these are just different types of devices that are for different purposes. And I'm going to show a product matrix to see what each of those mean. And when we talk about monitoring, we talk about, like, one-wire sensors. So, humidity, temperature. You can get into things like dry contacts. And the dry contact is where a door closure, open, close, it would alert this device. So, you have these physical boxes that have the ability to interact with their environment. Once they interact, there's really two things you can do. One is you can go onto their web page, which I will show in a little bit. Second thing is you can have alerts sent out. So, you can have alerts sent to email or your phone or things like that. Really nice way. For us, the big thing is you can integrate these into your full-blown monitoring system. So, we have a lot of telecos that have a whole bunch of network equipment. Have a whole bunch of telephone equipment. And they also have data centers and POPs. So, they want to know, hey, is the generator on? Am I low on fuel? Is the data center flooded? And they then integrate these tools, or we do, with their, for instance, OP5, SolarWinds, CheckMK, those kinds of tools that are out there today. So, those are the products. They have a whole line of serial products, as well as access products for RFID, getting into racks, things like that. If we go into the sensor line, these are the kinds of quote-unquote things you can monitor. And they're all different. They're all different grades. You can monitor a humidity temperature, one wire, for your rack. So, it can be screwed right into the rack. It makes it really easy to fit into a 19-inch or 10-inch rack, like a 1U. You can get things like your Temp One Wire Flat 3-meter cable, so that you can do your refrigerator or your freezer. So, the cable's flat so that you can still close the door and then monitor that. One of the big uses for this is pharmaceutical. The different products that are in the freezers and refrigerators have to be kept at a certain temperature. If they fall out of that, then they become no good. So, you've got these cures for diseases and whatnot that are really expensive, and they need to know when those things fall out of range, and that's what you could use this for. You get into one wire, you and I, and you get a little more intricate. You can do things like you can do water leak detection, you can do current to see how much am I using power-wise, or to see if power goes on and off. So, there's a whole array of devices and sensors you can hook up to it. So, it's really two-fold, right? You have the device itself, and then you have the sensors. And so, with that, the question is, well, geez, which one should I buy? Right. Yeah. So, what we do, and I said this during our warm-up, is a lot of the customers come to us and say, hey, I want to get an STE plus. And the first thing we say is, well, back up a second, tell us what you really want to do. And they say, well, I want to be able to monitor flood and three doors, and I want to monitor two humidity temperatures. So, what happens a lot of times is a customer sort of falls in love with a structure or a flyer or whatnot. And they might have a product that has other features that they don't need, like a bunch of relays, a bunch of dry contacts. And then what happens is they either underbuy or they overbuy. And so, we do, we say, hey, let's look at exactly what you want, and we'll help identify that product. So, we actually use internally. This is their product map. This is a really useful eye chart. So, you can see on the left, for instance, we have the OneWire sensors. We've got digital outputs down here. Does it support SMS? How many emails can I send to when there's an alert? And you really just use this as sort of like a multiplication table where you go across. You come up and say, okay, I want four digital inputs. Well, here it is. So, I can do the 3266. So, I can do the P2, 3266. And you can start to dial in the specific device that you want. And that's a great starting point. And then we usually show that to be, okay, well, you want four and four. Well, there's other ones. A smaller device might be a little less expensive or a bigger device which allows you forward growth. So, it's a great way to go through and see the features that you need match it up to the product that you want. I've got some interesting products for you to show today. Not so much on unboxing because we already have that. We are going to get into a fully configured ready-to-roll device. This right here is the STE2 product. And the STE2 is a monitoring device that you can plug into your Ethernet. And if you're familiar with power over Ethernet, you can do that as well so that you don't even need to plug in power. It'll even do wireless, thus the plastic case. There are two ports, but it supports three sensors. So, you could plug in a temperature, a humidity, or you could have a daisy chain and plug something else in. And then these are dry contacts. So, you can have a digital in so that we can actually see when, for instance, you might have seen these on your door. So, when somebody opens the door, this goes away, come back, this device can actually sense that. So, this is a really cool device. Go ahead, question. So, alarm companies, refrigerator doors, like all of these are using this type of technology? Exactly. Yep, these are the kinds of things. Now, to be fair, alarm company might have their own version of this. Some of the big alarm companies already have some types of devices, but we find that companies, because they're proprietary, they end up being really, really expensive. So, for $200 or $300, you could get a device like this that then you can do six different things. You can monitor six different pieces within your environment as opposed to spending like $800 to pay the alarm company to do one door. So, you know, we're seeing a blend of that, where people may use the alarm company for just one or two things, and then they use a product like this that's more flexible, more cost-effective, and can be integrated into their existing monitoring. Because, again, you can do SNMP through this, you can integrate it, there's an API, you can yank down all the data. They even have software to access the logging on this. So, if this loses connectivity to the network, there's some devices that have the ability to store the data internally, and then you can pull it once it connects up. And, again, that gets back to the matrix of figuring out, well, is that a feature you need? I do want to say that they even have some that go over the cellular network. So, this has to be plugged in through the Ethernet or goes to the Wi-Fi. But if you're a windmill out in the middle of nowhere, you're not going to have Wi-Fi, right? You're not going to have Ethernet connectivity, let's say. So, some of their devices you can plug a SIM card in and then get the same features and functionalities right over the cellular network. So, that's really popular as well. That's amazing. And how do you interact with it? What's your dashboard look like? So, I'm going to show my screen again, and I'm going to show you the STE2. So, hopefully now you can see my screen set up here, right? Yeah. Right? Yeah. Good. So, we have three sensors hooked up to this right now, really one and two built in. We've got our temperature sensor, which was that wire right here that you can see. And that guy is sitting right here. And if you look on my screen, we have it up into 21.7 Celsius, and the contact is set to closed right now. And you'll see that this is actually pretty close. And if I move it away, watch the albums of the screen, it goes to open. And I go back and it goes to close. So, think about how powerful your company is spending millions and millions of dollars in a remote data center for your application and your employees and your customers. And I hook this simple device up to your rack so that when somebody opens the cage, I get notified. I also know through this, if the air conditioning is working because the temperature is going to be monitored. And there could be three different temperatures. Could be one for outside the rack, inside and maybe under the floor. You can even do things, which I'll show a little bit later, which is their flood sensors and their water detection. So, again, I was at FISBA giving this presentation, and there's a really funny picture, which I wish I could bring up quickly, but it's basically showing two guys that are swimming, literally swimming in their data center because it flooded. And the joke there is that you have a couple hundred dollar device, even if it was $500 or $1,000 device, to be able to know that something has water in it is just invaluable. It really is priceless, and this kind of device can do that. So, web-based, getting back to the screen here, you can get up into general setup. There's a very easy tool that they give you for free. It's called the config tool. And you'll see we have a whole bunch of these devices in our labs and set up. You just plug it into your network. You click find devices. It comes up on here. You click on it, and it'll bring up the web interface. You can go through here, set all the data up. You can set up your email, set up the Wi-Fi, the centers, SNMP. One of the other really neat things is people that are sort of outside of the monitoring realm. They may say, look, I just want to go to a single dashboard and be able to look at all my sensors. And HWG, or Hardware Group, gives you a free service called SenseDesk. And this is what we're looking at here. And this is different, basically, demos that are sending information up. So we can have our STE2 sending information about our temperatures, about our power, about volts, and having all these different devices putting that out there. So you could go and you could look at these sensors, and then it shows graphs. It shows charts. And this can be done without really changing your firewall. So again, you now have your 25 windmills that are scattered across New York. You have these devices that are in the windmills pushing data up to the cloud. You log in with a username and password, and you can then very easily see what is the status of my business. Very powerful and even more cool is it's free. So that's the kind of thing that you can get with the HWG push devices like this. Wow. Yeah, cool. So I'm going to show you another cool device. This is the STE2, and I'm going to show you another really neat device, which is the IP Watchdog. Here it is. And let me bring up the spec sheet on this so I don't forget some of the cool things that it has. So this is an interesting device, very popular. IP Watchdog 2 Lite and connected through Ethernet. And you have power, and then you can even have power come in through a, not just a barrel jack, but an external power supply if you want for data center. And then on top of this, we have relays and contacts that allow you to power something on and off, be able to trigger something. And what that means as a great use case is a lot of times people say to us, I'm sure you've been at your house and your Internet's gone down, and what do you have to do? Well, you simply have to go over to your router and power it off and power it back on. Well, this IP Watchdog will go out and it'll ping a device like, I don't know, Google.com. It has a great example that should never go down. And if for some reason I can't ping Google and I can't ping Microsoft.com, I'm actually going to now throw the power on it. So we have this device that is connecting and is pinging this cool little device over here called the STE2. And when I yank this power, I'm obviously going to lose connectivity to it, and this device is going to watch for it. And it's going to go out there and it's going to say, hey, if I don't see it, I'm going to go ahead and start cycling power, and that's this little example right here. So there is so many use cases for a product like this. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of devices in this world that are just control off the leap. I don't know what's going on, but when you reboot it, it suddenly starts working. So this is the device that does that in an industrial fashion to where you can set it up. You can ping it. You can do a web get on it. And if it doesn't work, you can start power cycling things. Or you could change a relay so you can do other things like sound and alarm. Do a smoke screen, anything you want from a physical external standpoint. And I'm going to show you that setup, which is here. And this is the IP Watch 2. And take a look. See, it's starting to time out. Now if I power this guy back on, I'm going to plug that guy back in. And in a few seconds, we're going to see that it is going to now catch that. So to configure it really straightforward, right? Activate the channel. Call it something interesting. I'm going to ping. I'm going to reboot it for five seconds. Here's the IP address. There's a number of things that are going to fail before I go crazy. Easy as that. The configuration for these things really is straightforward. But what's more fun are the applications that customers approach us with. You're talking about things like car washes. I want to know when the door is down. I want to know when the door is up and somebody's gone through. When you start driving through the car wash and the water underneath starts to spray. Those are all sensors. Those are all things and relays and whatnot. And the HWG product line allows you to do all that. We have people from parking garages that use their water sensors because if there's water in the parking garages and it gets cold, it freezes. They have to send the ice trucks in or the salt trucks in. So again, the use cases go on and on. That is the IP Watchdog 2. I'm going to show another one. This is the Poseidon 2. There's another device which is really cool. Which is this guy here. This is the P2 3266. Again, people are like, what's the difference between that last one and this one? Again, they're all a little different. They usually have a couple of features and then they lose a couple of features. What I like about it is HWG only makes you pay for the things that you really want. They don't just have one gigantic product that you're like, I only want two sensors but I have to pay for 16. Really is cool. One of their flagship products, speaking of the big product, the P2 4200 series, which I absolutely love. That is their flagship one and we can talk about that a little bit. This is the P2 3266. It has some lights on here for power, whether there's an alarm, and then some of the contacts, whether they've been activated or not. There's eight external sensors you can have. You've got two ports and people say, how do you do eight out of two ports? You can daisy chain them. I'm sure you've seen those little phone cord because that's these types of jacks. This is an RJ45. This is an RJ11 jack, which is just like your regular old phone jack. There's a lot of two-to-one splitters out there. You can get up to eight sensors in here. You've got four digital, this one's for power, but you've got four digital inputs for detectors, things like your racks. You could do flood sensors. You could do things like motion sensors. You can do smoke detectors, things like that. It really goes on and on. This will do SNMP, TCP, Modbus, the whole nine yards. Really cool. This does not do Wi-Fi. This would be a great example to say, hey, the STE2 is great, but I have not two dry contacts. I want to monitor two racks, front door, back door, front door, back door. Now I can do two racks here, and I'm not just limited to three, but now I have eight sensors. You can see how somebody might like this if they only have a few sensors, and then you go up to this next guy right here. Really cool box. I absolutely love these kinds of things. They have rack mount kits for most of them. Again, it's a really solid box. I'm just impressed by their manufacturing of these. So that's the P2-3266. This is a really cool demo board of their WLD Relay. One of the things that I just want to show is that if you were to take your data center here and you had a rack sitting right here and it had your multimillion dollar equipment, you could have a flood sensor over here. Usually those are like the little two prongs that when the water touches both the prongs, it activates the sensor. That could be way over here, and the water could come in over here. So what happens is that this entire data center has to rise up two inches for the sensor to be tripped over here. And that could be really bad because your entire data center has to flood. So what they come up with is a really cool product, which is more of sensing cable. So this is the cable itself. This is just to show how it is sort of on the inside. It's probably tough to see on the camera, and this is the extension. So what we can do is we can take this sort of quote-unquote cheap cord here and drape it across your entire data center and put the sensing cable right under, let's say, your roof access or your air conditioner. And when just a couple of drops of water come down, it triggers this guy. And guess what? You can do a whole bunch of stuff with this. You can turn on lights and sirens and send it to another HWG box, and it goes on and on. You can do a whole bunch of things with it. But the power here is that we don't have to have the entire data center flood. We can put this cable right where it counts. Customers absolutely love that. They put these in, again, parking garages in the actual cracks. So if the water starts to trickle down, it gets in the cracks first before it floods into the tops where people walk, and then they send the salt trucks in so that that gets cleaned up. So it's great even for preventative maintenance. So really interesting product again. So from temperature to humidity to dry contacts to water sensing, these guys can really do it all. And again, that's just touching the surface of what these products can be used for. There's even more sensors out there like I was talking about. David Stempian, University of Rochester. He's concerned about security of these devices. Do they have built-in access control? Do the manufacturers provide continual support to firmware updates to address potential security vulnerabilities? Awesome question. So a couple of things. One is they do support SMMV3. And so you have the ability to connect securely through SMMV if you want and have to. The connections up to the external portal are a push method so that there's no incoming inbound authorization or activity. It's all pushing out to the cloud and that is done through a secure mechanism. The other thing is that they do provide software patches updates. They have a really cool, they've just done it right. So when you look at network upgrade, you can look at the available version right here. I can just click on that. It's going to tell me that the available version is 1015. And guess what I'm running? 1015? Upgrade is not needed right at the current version. But if I had to, I click start network upgrade and it goes ahead and upgrades for you. And they're actually really good at fixing little bugs and things like that. They've got a pretty interesting newsletter. They don't really hit you too hard. I don't know. I enjoy the frequency of the newsletter. It seems to be just enough to sort of tell you what's out there and what's cooking and it doesn't bog you down. The other thing that I do want to say from a configuration system standpoint is they've also done a great job at, for instance, you want to back it up, click on this, you're going to back it up. If you want to look at the values in the mid table, you can click on this and actually be brought right into the mid that they use. Sometimes when we're configuring devices, like, gee, how do we get the mids? How do we do this? They provide that all on a system basis. So in a way, each and every one of these devices are like a self-contained unit that can really take care of themselves and provide the information, the help. Here's a text list of common SNMP OIDs. People ask, oh, how do I get this from this device? Well, take a look. They provide right in the device a little text file to give you some examples. So here's how to get the name, the value, the serial number, so on and so forth. So upgrading is easy, finding documentation couldn't be any easier, and each one of them provides that information. So a great question. And I imagine they send these alerts to you when an upgrade is needed in addition to obviously the newsletter and logging in to see it. Yes, they do. Yes, and that gets into the newsletter and whatnot. So every once in a while, I'll get something to say, hey, there's a new firmware for the 3266. It fixes XYZ. Go out and get it and do that kind of thing. So security is a big issue. And these are the kinds of things, especially when you're turning on power and whatnot. That better be secure. If I'm putting the garage door up and down, I don't want to be dropping it out in summer. So these fans are really anybody's car. I want to know that that communication is just going to and from the right master to the HWG device itself. So I've not had any issues from that or had any customers. You'll call up saying that there's a problem on that end of it. Excellent. Great question. Thank you, David. Can you answer your question? Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for asking. Where can we go to get this integration not just with the hardware but the software? So we are the exclusive resale. And what I like is the technical support as well for HWG products in North and South America. So we get inquiries to buy and sell these things or sell them. And we also get a technical support question. So people are calling up all the time saying, hey, I'm setting this up and XYZ and we're trying to do these other things. How do we do it? And that's where we come in. So when we are looking at purchasing these products, the easiest thing to do is to go to our website, troopattechnologies.com. And we have it listed everywhere and everywhere. You can go to the bottom of the screen and go to, you know, HW Group. You can go up to the top and do hardware and HW Group products. And we sell the full line of products even if you don't see it in our web cart. We have all the products lined. So one of the things that we just touched on earlier, and I just want to just sort of show you this guy here, which is really cool. This is their sort of flagship product. This is their P2-4002 product, which I just switched off. There we go. This thing can do 12 dry contacts. It's got four relays. It can do 16 sensors. This is really the everything and anything kind of, you know. But we have some local telecommunication companies that have standardized on this so that every one of their data centers and every one of their telephone rooms has this in it. So when they have a generator, low fuel on battery, running out of battery, water detection, it's a standard because they know and they see the importance of that kind of monitoring. So it's great to know that they've chosen the HWG product line, you know, the P2-4002 line. So, you know, easy thing is just go to our hardware section, go down to HW Group, and you can simply buy these right online. We even do reseller discounts. As you can imagine, people don't just have one data center or one rack. They have to buy 20, 30, 40 of these. We even have people that are putting solutions together. We had one company that was putting air conditioners on top of, I forget what company it was, like Chipolta or something like that. They were trying out for a bid and they needed to monitor the air conditioner if it was on, if it was leaking, if it was, how much power. And so they chose the HWG line and they integrated that product into it and that became part of their solution. Love that. Yeah. I think, you know, you can go to our site, you can purchase them. We have, there are a whole bunch of demos that you can click on right here if you go to View Online Demos. We have that product matrix sheet right here as well. I'm going to go to the little spotlight here. If we have it under here, the product matrix and these are the online demos right here. And take some time to go through it, see what your needs are, sort of list out what you're thinking about, what kind of dry contacts or what you want to monitor and in what different locations. And if you can't figure it out, you can give us a call. We love doing engineering calls and whiteboards to figure out the solution. But I feel very confident that not only can TruePath help you, but we can make sure that there's an HWG product line or lines that can get you what you need. So 110% from the beginning, these guys get the Cool Tools 2017. I love it. Stamp it right there, Cool Tools 2017. And for any other software, hardware, Cool Tool that you may be using that you would like nominated for a Cool Tools award, go ahead and tweet us at hashtag the path to Cool Tools. We love to hear from you or you can email us jsa underscore TruePath at jamescato.com. And for everyone out there, thanks so much for such a great interactive conversation today. And I hope you enjoy this and go ahead and check out our other series in this fabulous TruePath Cool Tools web series. And that's at TruePathTechnologies.com. Thanks everyone for joining us and tune in next time. Thanks everyone. Bye now. Bye.