The challenge: The standard SolarWinds setup wasn’t enough

The company needed reliable, large-scale monitoring at mine sites with unreliable satellite links and harsh environmental conditions, including dust, heat, and power limitations.

While a standard SolarWinds configuration would significantly improve visibility across the corporate IT network (replacing basic up/down checks from The Dude by MikroTik), it wasn’t suitable for OT environments on remote mine sites. Standard SolarWinds polling engines require consistent internet and bi-directional traffic, both of which posed issues:

• Intermittent connectivity made polling unreliable.

• Bi-directional traffic introduced potential security risks by creating entry points into closed, mission-critical OT networks.

As a result, no OT monitoring had been deployed to date.

Both IT and OT teams needed deeper health metrics, while management wanted a unified dashboard to monitor and respond to issues across both IT and OT networks more proactively.

IT network: From “Is it alive?” to “Is it healthy?”

Step one was replacing The Dude with SolarWinds for IT network monitoring. Instead of a messy device diagram, we built a clean geographic map view that matched how devices were physically laid out on-site.

Before SolarWinds

After SolarWinds

Sample images used for privacy reasons.

The difference in detail was night and day. Rather than just seeing a device was “down,” teams could now drill in and see that Fan #3 in a specific switch had failed, the device was running at 39°C, and CPU usage was at 77%.

This shift from "alive vs. dead" to "healthy vs. struggling" enabled predictive maintenance instead of emergency repairs.

Detailed view of a network switch

OT network: From no visibility to secure, reliable monitoring

The breakthrough came through Remote Collectors - lightweight, site-level monitoring agents purpose-built for environments with limited connectivity and high security requirements.

Instead of relying on a central polling engine over unstable satellite links, each mine site now has a dedicated remote collector storing up to 24 hours of data locally and forwarding it securely when connectivity allows.

This enabled:

• Continuous visibility: No more gaps during outages. Data is cached locally and synced later.

• Deployment on minimal infrastructure: Collectors run on minimal hardware, ideal for solar-powered sites.

• Secure integration: All traffic is outbound-only and encrypted, with no need for inbound access or firewall changes, thus reducing risk to mission-critical OT networks.

Each mine site also has its own interactive geographic map within SolarWinds, mirroring on-site layouts. Switching between sites is as simple as selecting an item in a dropdown menu.

Mine site OT network dashboard

Executive dashboard: The missing piece

Most mining companies end up with separate monitoring silos for IT and OT, limiting cross-team visibility.

The SolarWinds Enterprise Operations Console bridges that gap, giving leadership a unified view across both environments without disrupting how each team works day to day.

Executive dashboard

Sample images used for privacy reasons.

The final outcomes

Proactive Health Monitoring: Real-time visibility into detailed device health metrics across 3,000+ devices at 70+ mine sites and 2 corporate networks, enabling predictive maintenance and faster operational insight.

Enhanced Reliability: Remote collectors ensure continuous monitoring during connectivity outages with up to 24 hours of local data storage. They also avoided the need for inbound access to OT networks.

Unified Experience: A single-vendor solution delivering a consistent monitoring approach for teams, and a shared high-level dashboard for management across both IT and OT.

The key insight

In many remote environments, monitoring architectures suffer from avoidable reliability and security issues, not due to poor design, but simply because teams aren’t aware that remote collectors are a viable alternative to standard polling engines.