24/7 monitoring and a status page: transparency for residents

Monitoring means noticing before residents do

Monitoring isn't checking on the system after someone complains. It means automated checks that run at short intervals, at any hour of the day or night, and alert the team in charge as soon as something looks wrong, ideally before it turns into a complaint at the front desk.

In an access control system, a lot can go wrong quietly: a terminal unplugged during cleaning, the server's disk filling up, a backup that stopped being sent, an update that never finished. None of these locks anyone out right away, but every one of them becomes a real problem if nobody notices for a few days.

What is worth keeping an eye on

At a minimum, useful monitoring for a residential building should check:

• Whether the building's equipment is powered on and communicating.
• Whether the system responds from the outside, the same way it responds to people using the dashboard.
• Whether each terminal is online.
• Whether backups are being made and sent off-site.
• Whether there's free space on the server's disk and in the terminals' memory.
• Whether updates were installed and the system is running the expected version.

Monitoring without exposing personal data

Good monitoring doesn't need to know who lives in the building. To tell whether the system is healthy, a handful of indicators is enough: how many terminals are online, how much space is left, when the last backup ran, how many data transfers failed. Names, photos and ID documents don't need to leave the condominium for any of that, and they shouldn't.

It's worth asking your vendor exactly what gets sent to their monitoring center. The answer says a lot about how the company treats the building's data.

Who should be alerted

An alert only works if it reaches someone who can act on it. Technical problems, like a terminal going offline or a full disk, should go first to the team that maintains the system. The building manager and the rest of the building's management, on the other hand, need to hear about the issues that are theirs to solve, like a terminal unplugged somewhere on the premises or device memory getting close to its limit.

A good alert also tells you when the problem is over. Without that, nobody knows whether the fault is still there, and the same issue gets debated all over again a few days later.

Why a public status page

Even with monitoring, failures happen. What makes the difference is how they're communicated. A public status page shows, at any time, whether the system is up and how it has performed over the past few days. When the dashboard won't load, a resident or the building manager can check the page and find out right away whether it's a general problem or something on their own phone.

That means fewer messages in the building's group chat, fewer calls to the building manager and less of a feeling that nobody is minding the store. It also creates an honest record: uptime is logged, bad days included, for anyone who wants to check.

How to read a status page

Most status pages follow the same format, and it helps to know what each part means:

• The current status: whether the system is responding right now.
• One bar per day, colored according to the share of checks that succeeded that day.
• The uptime percentage over periods such as 24 hours and 7, 30 and 90 days.
• Recent outages, with when each one started and how long it lasted.

A single failed check isn't always an outage: it may just be a momentary slowdown on the network. That's why outages are usually confirmed by more than one check in a row before they show up on the page.

How Abriu handles it

At Abriu, the hub in each condominium sends a health report every 5 minutes, covering software versions, disk, terminals and their capacity, backups and data transfers, using only counts and no personal data at all. The hub's updater sends a separate signal that gets through even if the main system stops, and our monitoring center also checks from the outside, every 5 minutes, whether the condominium is responding.

When something is off, such as a condominium that has gone silent, an offline terminal, an off-site backup that failed or went stale, a full disk or a failed update, our team gets an email when the problem starts and another when it ends. Every condominium has its own public status page at status.abriu.app, showing the current status, one bar per day for the last 90 days and recent outages. The page is served by our monitoring center, so it loads even when the building's equipment is down, and the dashboard links to it from the sign-in screen and from the notice that appears when the system isn't responding. The dashboard also emails the condominium's administrators when a terminal's memory or the hub's disk is almost full, and when data transfers to the terminals have failed.