30% Less Downtime With Unified IT-OT Monitoring

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At a glance

 ·  30% reduction in unplanned downtime across eight sites in 12 months  ·  Cross-domain MTTR cut 50%, from 40 minutes to under 20  ·  98% of P1 incidents acknowledged within 15 minutes  ·  Compliance reporting fully automated, zero manual data extraction

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Who they are

This utility runs eight generation and distribution sites out of one central network operations center (NOC), responsible for both corporate IT infrastructure and a wide footprint of grid-edge OT assets, the SCADA systems, PLCs, and field instrumentation that keep power flowing. If your NOC is still running IT and OT monitoring as two separate worlds under one roof, this story will feel familiar.

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Two monitoring stacks, one blind spot between them

The NOC operated two completely separate monitoring stacks. One team watched servers, network traffic, and applications. Another watched SCADA systems, PLCs, and field instrumentation across every site's grid-edge OT assets. Both screens sat in the same room, but different teams, different tools, and different escalation paths meant the two sides rarely spoke the same language during a live incident.

That split hurt most during cross-domain incidents, the category doing the most damage to uptime. When a fault touched both IT and OT, engineers had to manually reconstruct a shared timeline from two unrelated log sources before root cause diagnosis could even begin. That process averaged 40 minutes, and every one of those minutes was downtime accumulating across all eight sites, since there was no cross-domain incident correlation to shortcut the investigation.

Two other costs compounded the problem. Maintenance ran on a fixed calendar rather than actual equipment condition, so healthy assets got serviced too often while failing ones weren't always caught in time. And every quarterly compliance report meant someone manually pulling and reconciling data from four disconnected systems by hand, a process that consumed days of engineering time each quarter and left real room for reporting errors.

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Deploying a unified observability platform behind a one-way data diode

The utility brought in Interwork to build a unified observability platform for IT and OT environments, deployed on Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK, purpose-built to close this exact operational blind spot. The engagement paired SCADA network integration services with a clear technical goal: reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) on the incidents costing the most uptime.

OT data ingestion, secured by design. OT telemetry came in through OPC UA behind a one-way data diode: OT data flows into the IT monitoring layer, but no traffic ever flows back into the OT network. The utility gained full visibility into its grid-edge OT assets without opening a new attack surface on industrial control systems, a non-negotiable for critical infrastructure.

One correlated data layer, not two parallel ones. IT metrics and OT tag history merged into a unified time-series store with correlation indexing, delivering real cross-domain incident correlation so an engineer sees the full picture across both domains on a single timeline, instead of stitching two logs together after the fact.

Alerting rebuilt around ownership, not noise. Every alert capable of paging someone got a named owner and an attached runbook. ServiceNow integration auto-creates incidents with the correct classification and assignment the moment an alert fires, cutting out the manual triage step that used to slow response.

Maintenance shifted from calendar to condition. Asset health scoring, built from OPC UA tag history, now generates predictive maintenance tickets before an asset crosses its failure threshold, rather than waiting for a scheduled inspection to catch a problem already underway.

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What changed

For the first time, IT and OT teams were looking at the same screen. Incidents that used to require a reconstruction exercise became diagnosable in real time, and the maintenance team started receiving predictive tickets ahead of failures instead of reactive alerts after them. Reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) turned out to be less about faster engineers and more about giving them one correlated view to work from.

Talk to our team about unifying your IT and OT monitoring →

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In their words

"Before this, root cause on a cross-domain incident meant two teams comparing notes from two different systems and hoping the timestamps lined up. Now everyone's looking at the same timeline from the first minute. That's the difference between a 40-minute investigation and a 40-minute fix."

Director of Grid Operations, Multi-Site Energy Utility

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Would this work for your operation?

Does OT data ever leave the OT network? No. Ingestion runs one-way through a data diode. OT data flows into the observability layer for monitoring and correlation, but no traffic is ever routed back into the OT network, keeping the industrial control environment isolated from external access.

How long did the full rollout take? Deployment ran in phases across all eight sites over several months, starting with the diode-based OT ingestion layer, then layering in alert ownership, ServiceNow integration, and predictive maintenance scoring as historical tag data accumulated.

What made the biggest difference operationally? Naming an owner and attaching a runbook to every page-worthy alert. It sounds simple, but combined with the underlying SCADA network integration services, it's what took acknowledgment time from inconsistent to 98% within 15 minutes and is the main reason the team continues to reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) quarter over quarter.

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See how this could work for your sites

If cross-domain incidents are still costing you a reconstruction exercise every time, let's map out what a unified observability layer could look like across your sites.

Schedule a technical system review with our cross-domain observability architects →