About this talk
Irish Rail built IRIS — a real-time railway monitoring platform powered by Grafana — with a team of just three, turning fragmented IoT data from 50+ vendors into unified, actionable visibility across 2,500km of track. In this GrafanaCON session, technology consultant Richard Donovan and IRIS Project Manager Seosaimh O Fatharta show how a laptop demo became a national infrastructure platform.
Learn how IRIS (Irish Rail Intelligence Sensing) unified siloed sensors, used Grafana alerting to detect rail buckling and flooding before train drivers could call it in, and delivered GIS-based dashboards giving field teams and managers instant awareness of track conditions. The stack — MQTT broker, TimescaleDB, and Grafana on Azure — was chosen for simplicity, enabling a small team to deliver production-grade monitoring without a massive enterprise rollout. The talk covers alerting design, user adoption, historical data queries, and a roadmap toward AI-driven anomaly detection and camera sensor fusion.
0:00 Introduction
2:54 The Problem: Siloed IoT Devices
7:49 First Win: Temperature Alerts Live in 2 Days
10:33 Building the IRIS Platform
16:01 Dashboards, GIS Maps, and Alerting Design
19:26 Real-World Use Cases: Flooding and Heat
27:50 Roadmap and Key Takeaways
Links/resources:
Learn about GrafanaCON: https://grafana.com/events/grafanacon/?src=yt
Learn more about Irish Rail: https://www.irishrail.ie/en-ie
Get started with the Grafana Cloud forever-free tier: https://grafana.com/g/cloud
Have a question? Ask Grot, your AI helper: https://grafana.com/grot/
Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf
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#Grafana #Observability #IrishRail #Trains #PublicTransportation #Ireland
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