Infrastructure Management 2.0 and New Kontakt.io Panel Features Make Beacon Maintenance Time-Efficient and Stress-Free

Sit back, relax, and make your infrastructure management and monitoring easier than ever. Introducing Infrastructure Management 2.0 with a smart and powerful toolset that helps you plan, monitor and maintain your beacon deployment, and keeps you informed about the health and whereabouts of your beacons and tags.
Using new features in the Kontakt.io Panel requires an Infrastructure Management subscription. You can buy 3-month Infrastructure Management subscription when buying any Kontakt.io device in our store. To add Infrastructure Management to your existing devices, please contact your account manager.
Many deployments are still planned and documented on a piece of paper. Many are not documented at all. While this can work at the beginning, managing and maintaining such an infrastructure becomes troublesome and extremely ineffective over time. Locating devices that need to be serviced, onboarding new maintenance team members, or outsourcing maintenance become frustrating and time-consuming.
If you’ve done or are planning a beacon deployment, you need to have a proper set of tools that support you from the planning stage right up to maintaining the infrastructure. And by proper we mean cloud-based, simple, and effective in the long run.

Meet our new Location view 

Planning starts with a floor plan, therefore the new Location view in the Kontakt.io Panel integrates with Google Maps. This new feature enables you to put virtual representations of your beacons on a map. If you do it during the planning stage, you can share the map with your deployment team so they use it as a guideline on where each device should be mounted. Once your infrastructure is up and running, the map will help you quickly locate any beacon when it needs to be serviced, updated, or replaced.
With the Location view you can now:

• Create your deployment location(s) on Google Maps
  
  
• Upload floor plans (even multi floor buildings) into created geographical locations.
• Assign Beacons and Gateways* to a created location and pinpoint them on the uploaded floor plans.
  *Available in the next iteration.
• Document deployment information (mounting height, method, wall vs. ceiling) as tags to a beacon’s metadata.

Enhanced monitoring Dashboard

Failing to replace devices that have run out of battery or gone missing can be really expensive.
Therefore, once you’ve deployed your infrastructure, you need  to constantly monitor its health so you can act before a problem occurs. With the adjusted monitoring Dashboard, the most important information about your infrastructure is just two clicks away:

• Actionable graphs — by clicking a specific cohort of devices – e.g. “beacons with 0-19% battery” – you can jump directly to the list of those devices.
  
  
  
• We also improved some graphs and added new ones, including a chart which visualizes stock vs deployed beacons distributed to different locations.
  
  

Smart Alerts

Monitoring your infrastructure is great but automated monitoring is better!  Hence, we have implemented automated smart Alerts to make keeping track of your beacon maintenance easy and stress-free as you will be alerted about low battery status ahead of time. Smart Alerts  are part of our  Preventive Device Maintenance and they:

• Notify you about changes in the health of your beacon infrastructure.
  
  
• Alert you to prepare for maintenance when a predetermined battery-level is reached.
• Alert you when your devices’ firmware need to be updated**
• You may also choose to be alerted when some of you beacons are not detected within a given time period.
• Once Alert conditions are met, they trigger an email to predefined addresses (e.g. maintenance team). Email will include an explanation of the reason for the alert and provide simple instructions for recommended actions.
• Alert emails also enable the recipient to follow the URL to the New Notification sections that include all devices that caused an Alert to trigger. Hence the maintenance team can quickly analyse which devices have problems and where they are located.
• Finally, the notifications also provide information regarding read vs unread status, and enable a maintenance team to add notes, e.g. what actions were taken with a particular Alert.

*Available in next iterations.
By combining Alerts, new Location features, and an enhanced Dashboard, your maintenance work gets more structured and efficient: you can easily check where your beacons are and what’s their health and set up conditions that will alert you about any issues that require your attention.

New vs Old Kontakt.io Panel

The following items have been removed from the new Kontakt.io Panel view:

• Analytics section including: History, Dwell Time, Heatmaps, Connections, Timeline, Details,
• *Live Map → you still can see the real-time beacon scans under Gateway section.
  *Improved Live Map version coming soon.
• Old view is still available for those who have active Location Engine subscription
  and had already assigned gateways to a map. Simply click on SWITCH TO OLD VIEW in the specific Location section to go back to the previous view.

NOTE: It is impossible to create new locations in the old view, but the position of the gateways on the map can still be edited. Please remember that changes saved in the old view will not be reflected in the new Location view, and vice-versa.