Data Volume per Plant

Plants on a mobile connection are billed by the megabyte, so it helps to know how much data actually moves at each site. Mirox measures the traffic it generates itself — the monitoring agent's own exchanges with the cloud, and everything crossing the plant's VPN tunnels — and shows it per plant, over the period you choose. This guide covers reading those figures, comparing plants, and using the traffic pattern when a connection misbehaves.

What These Figures Cover

They cover Mirox's own data consumption at the plant — not your mobile provider's bill. Mirox has no connection to your SIM or mobile provider: the contracted data allowance, the volume the provider bills you for, and how much of your quota is left are not visible to the platform and cannot be derived from these numbers. Anything else sharing the same line — the router itself, data loggers reporting to their manufacturer's portal, cameras, other devices on site — is invisible here too. Treat the figures as a well-founded lower bound on what the line carries, and reconcile against your provider's invoice.

Before You Start

  • The plant needs a working connection — a direct plant VPN or an organization VPN service — otherwise there is nothing to measure.
  • Anyone who can view the plant can read these figures. Unlike the networking tools, no technical role is required; a Viewer sees them too.

Open in Mirox

Open the plant's Dataflow section. The traffic figures sit in the cards along the top.

Reading the Figures

The Dataflow page shows two separate traffic figures, each with a download (↓) and an upload (↑) value:

  • Agent Network — what the monitoring agent itself exchanged with the Mirox cloud and the measurement database. This is the traffic that keeps your plant's data flowing into the platform.
  • VPN Network — everything that crossed the plant's VPN tunnels: the organization VPN service, every direct plant VPN, and every site router connected to a tunnel the plant hosts, added together.

The two normally count different connections, so adding them gives the plant's total Mirox consumption. The exception is a site whose router deliberately sends all its internet traffic through a VPN tunnel — then the same bytes are counted in both figures and the sum is too high. If that is how your router is set up, read the two values separately rather than adding them.

Both follow the time range selected at the top of the page. The default is the last 24 hours; switch to one hour for a close look or 30 days for a monthly view, or scroll and zoom to any period you like. Changing the range changes the figures — they are always "how much moved during the selected period", never a lifetime total.

Per-Tunnel Detail

When a plant has more than one tunnel, each VPN card further down the page carries its own traffic values. That is how you find which tunnel is the heavy one — useful when a site hosts several connecting routers and you want to know which one is doing the talking.

Comparing Plants and Asking for a Ranking

The fastest route to a fleet-wide view is the AI assistant. It reads the same figures and can sort them for you:

  • "How much data does Bacchus I use?"
  • "List the plants by consumed data volume."
  • "Which plant used the most data last month?"
  • "Are there connection problems, and how much data is each plant moving?"

The assistant answers with the period it actually measured and keeps the two figures — agent traffic and VPN traffic — apart. Plants with no readings for the period are left out of a ranking rather than shown as zero, because "we measured nothing" and "nothing moved" are different answers. It will also state, once, that these are Mirox's own figures rather than your provider's bill.

Using Traffic to Diagnose a Connection

A mobile data plan that has used up its allowance usually is not switched off — it is slowed to a crawl. The router still registers on the network and the tunnel still comes up now and then, so the connection looks alive while almost nothing gets through. The traffic pattern is what tells the two apart:

  • Data kept flowing steadily across the period → the line is carrying traffic, so an exhausted allowance is unlikely. Look elsewhere: a single device, a logger, or a configuration problem.
  • Traffic collapsed compared with what the same plant used to move, while the tunnel keeps re-establishing → consistent with a throttled or used-up data plan. It is equally consistent with weak mobile reception or a congested line, so it points you at the uplink, not at a specific culprit.
  • Traffic stopped entirely and the plant is not reporting at all → that is an outage, not a capacity problem. Start with network devices and the plant's VPN status.

Because Mirox cannot see your contract, the platform will never tell you that an allowance is used up — only that the traffic pattern is consistent with it. Two places settle the question, and both are outside Mirox:

  1. Your mobile provider's customer portal — the usage figure and the remaining allowance for that SIM.
  2. The router's own mobile status page — signal strength, network registration, and its internal data counter.

Keeping Consumption Down

The heaviest avoidable traffic on a metered line is a full network discovery sweep. If a plant is on a mobile connection with a tight allowance, scan a single device rather than triggering a whole-subnet discovery run when you only need to check one address.

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