InfraStructure Asset Manager
The ability to manage Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) infrastructure devices (base stations, collectors and repeaters) is a critical component of managing a Sensus FlexNet AMI deployment. Management may be performed by the customer or by Sensus depending on the type of deployment, and currently requires significant technical knowledge. Those responsible for monitoring the overall health, configuration and performance of these infrastructure devices need a single place to view and manage existing and potential issues to enable investigation and proactive resolution of these issues. To address this need, a new web application called Infrastructure Asset Manager (IAM) is being developed.
​
IAM is a standalone application that centralizes all base station/collector/repeater management into a single application. From this application a user would be able to remotely manage all the base stations in the system; including base station configuration, base station software upgrades, notifications of critical events based on a dashboard, various reports, and base station performance metrics. Note the application is not for RF network management or tuning; those functions will be part of a different application.
IAM Architecture Details
​
The client is a single-page webapp, written in VUE and Javascript. The goal is to share VUE components with other teams and have a common look-and-feel.
​
The client communicates with the IAM web service via a REST API. That API is documented in swagger. That documentation is generated from the server springboot code using Springfox.
​
The Tower Service is also a Springboot application with a REST API. This service will eventually be used by any service that wants information about TGBs, including RNI.
​
​
The two REST APIs here differ slightly. The one presented to the IAM webapp is geared toward the IAM UI. The Tower Service is more generic, allowing any service to do anything with a TGB.
​
The IAM server uses the existing FWMA application to manage the Operating System packages on TGBs.
​
In the future, we'll have many additional microservices. The Auth Service provides authentication and is actually available today. the IAM Webapp will call it directly.
The Preferences Service saves "settings" or really any set of name/value pairs. The IAM Webapp will also call it directly to store user settings. Later, we will have an Endpoint Service that manages endpoints (meters). IAM does not yet provide any functionality that requires it to deal with endpoints. Not shown in the diagram is that the IAM Server talks directly to the TGBs. It will use the new Unified REST API provided by the TGBs. This is a replacement for the current "JSON Config File" scheme that NMS uses to manage configuration data on the TGBs. Also not shown in the diagram is a database associated with the IAM Server. This will likely by MongoDB, and contain a very small amount of data.