Smart Meter Data Analytics with Splunk – Part 1

Have you ever wanted to ingest your Smart Meter energy data into Splunk so you can track your electricity and gas usage? With UK gas and electricity prices rising rapidly and Winter approaching fast there’s no better time to hook your favourite big data platform up to your Smart Meter. Smart meter data analytics in Splunk? Read on…

UK Smart Meters

In reality the UK Smart Meter hasn’t been a total success. Essentially the devices do two things that the previous meters could not:

1. Send your usage data to your energy provider automatically
2. Provide the ability to view your current usage via a display screen

You can’t easily access your historical data (your energy company may let you view it on their website). Through the display screen you can generally view current and recent historical usage but that’s about it.

Splunk and Smart Meters

The data a Smart Meter collects is a relatively straightforward time series of metrics, so it is a great data source for Splunk to ingest. The problem is that Smart Meters do not provide any means for you to get to your data. Thankfully there is a solution, step forward the GlowStick Zigbee CAD.

GlowStick Zigbee CAD

The wireless Zigbee protocol is used by many Smart Home devices. The Glowstick is a USB stick that acts as a bridge between Zigbee (to talk to the Smart Meter) and Wifi (to upload the data to a cloud storage service provided by the vendor (note there are no ongoing costs for this service). You need to check that your Smart Meter is supported before ordering. The device costs £49.99 and can be ordered here: https://shop.glowmarkt.com/products/glow-stick.

Your data is then available to view in the smartphone app they provide called “Bright”. This app provides similar functionality to a standalone smart meter display but also allows you do look at your historical usage of gas and electricity.

In addition to the smart phone app, and crucially for what we will be doing through this series of posts, Glowmarkt also provide an API that you can use to query your own data.

Next Steps

In the next post in this series we will look at the API provided and how we can pull the data in and ultimately perform smart meter data analytics in Splunk.