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RTU Applications 
The RTU is capable of adapting to a variety of environments and applications.
Equipment Shelters Equipment shelters include CEVs, mountain top equipment huts, transmitter huts, repeater stations, and fiber-route regeneration huts.
Headends
Headend management includes cable & HFC headends, digital TV equipment headends, nodes, and hubs. When used in headends, RTUs provide an effective tool for monitoring gaps in mission critical equipment.
Many of the managed devices do not have embedded SNMP agents, though most have contact closure outputs that are activated during alarm conditions. These outputs are connected to the RTU's contact closure inputs to allow these devices to be managed remotely.
Some of the managed devices already have embedded SNMP agents. These devices usually still also have the external contact closure outputs. In these cases the RTU provides uniform alarm management, with similar packets being transmitted regardless of the type of equipment being managed or is manufacturer. The RTU provides an independent manager capability, while also incorporating environmental alarms and flexible connectivity options.
In this way the RTUs provide a consistent interface to a large variety of equipment from a number of manufacturers. This simplifies training of operations staff, making it easier to identify the root cause of problems. An RTU is a management gap filler providing additional levels of information for equipment which may have otherwise had little or no management capability.
Floor Alarms & Rack Equipment
Floor alarms cover a range of different things, but this description focuses on monitoring rooms full of rack based equipment and other general equipment. The RTU provides a uniform alarm interface for monitoring racks of multi-vendor equipment, including security and environmental sensing.
Typical floor alarms are generated from a wide variety of equipment.
Kerbside / Roadside Cabinets
Kerbside cabinets are used by a number of different infrastructure industries including:
 telecommunications
broadband
power, water, utiliteies, sewerage
road and rail traffic management
As these cabinets are located away from the central monitoring centers, it is critical that information and alarms are communicated quickly and efficiently.
The RTU can communicate back to the Operations Center using an Ethernet link or a dialup connection. The RTU operates the same way in either case. This means that if you deploy RTUs with different types of communication mechanisms, this is transparent to the staff at the Operations Center.
Server Rooms
Server rooms include IT equipment rooms, communications hubs. PCs, servers, mini computers and mainframes. Some or all of these will need monitoring. These facilities usually incorporate adequate monitoring of network issues, storage, memory, and operating systems, but often fail to manage devices such as air conditioners, smoke alarms, high temperatures, water ingress etc. When one of these alarm conditions arises, whole clusters of servers and other equipment can fail and can sometimes be irretrievably damaged. RTUs can be used in server rooms to report back these alarm conditions in addition to normal operational feedback.
Exchange Equipment
Monitoring of exchange equipment is vital for the efficient running of any telco network. Most core exchange equipment comes with its own monitoring capabilities, but often much of the supporting equipment is not monitored in a manner suitable for centralized monitoring control.
RTUs fill in these monitoring gaps, allowing central operations staff to monitor a range of equipment in real time using SNMP and web functionality. RTUs provide a uniform interface over all connected equipment from one or more manufacturers.
Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure includes CEVs, pipe lines, water, power nodes, sub station management, mountain top equipment huts, transmitter huts, repeater stations, fiber route regeneration huts, etc.
Items That Typically Need Monitoring
The following are items that tend to be monitored by RTUs in most applications. Some applications may also need to monitor information more specific to those applications.
air conditioning
rectifier alarms
battery levels
mains power
water levels
pressure, flow rates, humidity
solar panel voltages and theft
temperatures
PLCs
site door control
water ingress
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