Telemetry Debt: Taming Building Data Overload

Buildings today produce more telemetry than most teams can use: alarms from access control, HVAC performance data, UPS and power metrics, carrier and network logs, and vendor health pings. Left unmanaged, that data becomes "telemetry debt": noisy alerts, unclear ownership, long mean-time-to-respond, and missed signals that matter. In this 10-minute interview, Alex Morgan and commercial property veteran Michael Harrington define telemetry debt, explain its operational causes, and walk through pragmatic tradeoffs owners and facilities teams can make to reduce noise, assign ownership, and prioritize actionable signals. Listeners will get concrete examples of lightweight retention and alerting rules, simple triage workflows that prevent vendor handoffs from becoming black holes, and a checklist for running a telemetry cleanup pilot that delivers immediate uptime and tenant experience improvements. This episode focuses on decision-making and operations — not deep technical configuration — so building leaders can act quickly and confidently.