How to monitor and optimize renewable energy assets: Inside the SYSO observability stack

Since their start in 2019, SYSO has had a clear strategy: to help customers optimize their investments in renewable energy systems — and, as a result, steer the U.S. electrical system toward a more sustainable future.

Over the years, SYSO has become a leading provider of renewable energy ISO market registration, asset revenue stream optimization, and ISO market scheduling services across U.S. energy markets. They have a team of network operators who work 24/7 to manage the day-to-day operations of their customers’ energy assets, such as solar panels or battery energy storage systems (BESS), which allow you to store energy for later use.

“We’re making sure that the performance of those assets is as expected and that, if we’ve scheduled the asset to do a certain thing on behalf of the customer, it’s actually doing it,” explained James Nichols, Senior Vice President, Technology at SYSO. “So, for example, if it’s a large battery and it’s in a de-rated condition, we need to respond quickly and fix it.”

The team currently monitors and manages over 200 different physical assets for SYSO customers. And to do that effectively, they rely on Grafana Cloud.

“For our operations team and our network operations center, Grafana Cloud is their main tool,” Nichols said. “It provides visibility and a consistent dashboard experience across all the different systems we manage.”

The team also leverages Grafana Alerting to receive real-time notifications about any issues that occur within the energy systems they oversee, and to ensure the highest possible quality of observability data.

Why Grafana Cloud: SYSO’s search for that single pane of glass

The SYSO operations team monitors renewable energy assets around-the-clock for its clients, identifying and troubleshooting issues as they occur to ensure those assets run optimally.

But before Grafana, that process was tedious and time-consuming. Network operators relied on disparate monitoring tools for each asset they managed, meaning they’d have to jump between different systems and UIs to find the data they needed.

“The operators would have to manually log into a different system for each asset vendor to monitor the fleet,” Nichols said. “Each vendor has their own unique layout, and some had absolutely no dashboards. Generally, all of the vendors make data points available, but you’d have to individually collect and analyze them.”

To streamline their monitoring efforts, the team began to search for an observability platform that could provide a consistent, centralized view of asset performance and health. They also wanted a platform that’s accessible and easy to use — and that’s when they turned to Grafana.

“I think one of the biggest things for me with Grafana is the ease of doing things like manipulating and updating dashboards, and adding alerts,” said Nichols, who had experience using Grafana prior to joining SYSO. “It all just works pretty easily and I knew that if I selected Grafana for our tool, I would be able to get other people using it.”

Turns out, Nichols was right. SYSO implemented Grafana, starting with Amazon Managed Grafana in 2020 and then migrating to Grafana Cloud one year later, because they wanted the benefit of instant upgrades and automatic security patches. The team ramped up quickly, and was soon managing alerts and modifying dashboards based on real-time operational needs.

Just as importantly, they achieved that simplified, single-pane-of-glass view into their customers’ energy assets.

“We use Grafana to get that consistent view across all the different types of assets that we manage, so the operations team can make sure we are maximizing the revenue of those assets for our customers,” Nichols said.

A Grafana dashboard used by the Syso operations team to monitor the health of energy assets.

As SYSO has grown its client base over the years and expanded into new ISO energy markets, Grafana has become an invaluable resource to monitor the company’s increasingly diverse portfolio of energy systems.

“When we started to get into other asset manufacturers that have completely different sets of data points and a completely different nomenclature, we could use Grafana to translate and reduce complexity by providing a dashboard that looks exactly the same and works across different data points and vendors,” Nichols said.

Staying in the know with Grafana Alerting

Today, Grafana Cloud also drives the alerting system for the SYSO operations team. They have roughly 100 alerts configured in Grafana Alerting, so if something goes awry — such as an asset being in standby mode when it’s supposed to be discharging power, or energy outputs not being at expected levels — the on-call operators are notified immediately.

“We had 9,000 alerts last year,” Nichols said. “Those go to the network operations team and there’s an escalation policy, so a set of folks that are on-call can see the alerts come in and take action on them immediately.”

Grafana Cloud has also streamlined SYSO’s overall alerting system, making it both more efficient and intuitive for on-call operators, Nichols explained.

“Previously, if something went wrong with an asset, you might get three or four unique alerts for one asset,” he said. “With the new alerting infrastructure in Grafana Cloud, alerts are grouped, so our operations team just gets one alert, rather than three different alerts that have to be pieced together. That was a big productivity gain for our team.”

In addition to using Grafana Alerting to monitor energy assets, the team relies on alerts in Grafana Cloud to ensure the integrity of the observability data they’re looking at.

“We added in a set of dashboards and alerts for data freshness and quality, now we’re able to make it more systematic,” Nichols said. “We get an alert within five minutes if a data point might be stuck and we need to go in, instead of relying on a person to do it.”

Overall, Grafana Cloud has been a key capability in helping the startup continue to scale, without straining the operations team.

“We can continue to add more sites, ensure the data quality is good, and maximize the performance of the assets with the same network operations crew,” Nichols said.

Looking ahead: the SYSO customer portal powered by Grafana Cloud

Given the success SYSO has seen with Grafana Cloud, the company is now exploring how they could use the managed observability platform to serve as the foundation for a new customer portal.

“We were on a customer call, working with their operations team, and we showed them a Grafana dashboard so they could see what was going on in their system,” Nichols explained. “They saw it and immediately said, ‘Wow. We would love to have that.’”

The idea is to create a portal, powered by Grafana Cloud, where SYSO customers can access dashboards for their unique energy assets. This would allow SYSO to deliver a real-time data visualization experience directly to their customers via a platform they know is reliable and easy to use.

“The vision is that the asset owners, our customers, could log in and see a lot of the same dashboards that we see,” Nichols said. “They could interact with the data and download the data — and do all of that without us having to build our own customer portal.

For SYSO, this customer portal represents the next major milestone in their observability journey with Grafana Cloud.

“We would’ve never been able to get to where we are now without Grafana along the way,” Nichols said.

Interested in an OEM partnership with Grafana? Please reach out to your Grafana Labs account team for support. They can ensure you have the proper license rights, as the Grafana Cloud standard MSA is for internal-use only.