Case Study
Critical Alarms for Gas Utility Co in real time with IOT on AWS
Clearscale helped reduce response times from Hours to Seconds for Critical Energy Infrastructure
Overview
Meet Our Hero
A major gas utility solution provider needed to bridge a critical safety gap: their existing IoT platform lacked real-time alerts for “hard alarms” representing dangerous field conditions. Clearscale built a serverless, event-driven Emergency Notification engine on AWS that dispatches multi-channel alerts (SMS, Voice, Email) in seconds and provides a secure, “no-login” emergency dashboard for field responders.
The client is a premier provider of end-to-end measurement and monitoring solutions for natural gas utilities. Their proprietary IoT devices serve as the “eyes and ears” of utility networks, collecting vital data to ensure safety and reliability. While their existing platform was excellent at trend analysis, it was not built for the split-second demands of emergency incident response.
The Challenge
- Delayed Response: Critical safety information was only visible when a user logged into the portal, creating life-safety risks during pressure anomalies.
- Communication Silos: Reliance on a single email channel meant alerts were often buried in inboxes or blocked by filters.
- Access Bottlenecks: Emergency responders and third-party contractors lacked full portal credentials, preventing them from seeing vital data instantly.
- Logic Complexity: The new system needed to aggregate multiple alarms, retry notifications every five minutes, and immediately stop alerts once acknowledged.
The Goal
The client required a robust, high-availability system to manage “hard alarms” for Real-Time IoT Safety. The primary goal was to guarantee alert delivery across multiple channels, provide frictionless data access for field technicians, and maintain a complete audit trail of every incident.
“We knew that our company was poised for significant growth and we needed the right partner to help us build a scalable data management platform on AWS. Clearscale designed and implemented a solution to collect and analyze the data generated across our network of IoT devices, allowing us to serve our clients even more effectively.”
Reza Soudmand,
Director of Product Development, Romet Limited
The Clearscale Solution
Clearscale architected a modern, AWS Serverless solution that prioritizes reliability and speed by decoupling data ingestion from notification delivery.
- Real-Time Ingestion & Processing: When a “hard alarm” triggers, it hits AWS IoT Core and is fast-tracked via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. A specialized AWS Lambda function evaluates the alarm’s severity, ensuring life-safety threats are routed for near-instant processing.
- Multi-Channel Orchestration: To eliminate single points of failure, Clearscale integrated Amazon SNS, Pinpoint, and Connect. Unacknowledged alarms initiate a persistent retry loop, escalating from email/SMS to an
- Secure “Magic Link” Dashboard: Clearscale developed a public-facing dashboard accessible via temporary, scoped links, allowing field technicians to see live alarm data instantly without a traditional login. Acknowledging the alarm requires a 2FA code, creating a verified audit trail while maintaining high-speed access.
The Impact
The new system transformed the Gas Utility provider’s incident response capability, moving the company from reactive monitoring to proactive safety management.
Data Storage & Streaming
- Amazon DynamoDB — Multiple tables: Normal Stats, Urgent Stats, Alarms, Alerts, and Links tables. DynamoDB Streams are also used to trigger the real-time alarm processing pipeline.
- Amazon S3 — Historical data archival, IoT event storage (referenced alongside Athena/Glue), and pre-recorded audio files for automated phone calls.
- AWS Glue — Referenced as part of the existing S3/Athena/Glue data pipeline.
- Amazon Athena — Referenced as part of the existing S3/Athena/Glue query layer.
Compute & Orchestration
- AWS Lambda — Multiple functions: Validation Lambda (stats/alarm routing), Alarm Processing Lambda (real-time Clownfish alerts), Link Processor Lambda (magic link creation & aggregation), Link Sender Lambda (notification delivery), and Link Dispatcher Lambda (channel routing).
- Amazon CloudWatch Events — Scheduled invocation of the Link Sender Lambda every minute for the 5-minute retry loop.
Messaging & Notifications
- Amazon SQS — Links SQS Queue as the primary input interface for the multi-channel notification system, with dead-letter queue support.
- Amazon SNS — Separate topics for email and SMS routing, using filter policies and custom message attributes (email_address, phone_number) to target specific recipients.
- Amazon Pinpoint — SMS message delivery, carrier routing, delivery status reporting, and 10DLC/sender ID registration for US and international markets.
- Amazon Connect — Automated outbound phone calls using pre-recorded audio files, triggered programmatically via the Connect API.
Turn IoT Monitoring Into Proactive Safety on AWS.
ClearScale helps energy and utility providers transform complex monitoring systems into resilient, proactive safety platforms. If your legacy IoT infrastructure is delaying critical responses or hindering field technician access, let's talk.