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Frequently Asked Questions

General​

What is EmberNet?​

A secure, multi-tenant platform for monitoring and automating industrial infrastructure, built to run at the edge. See Platform Overview.

Who makes EmberNet?​

Fireball Industries, headquartered in Macedonia, Ohio.

What industries does it serve?​

Manufacturing, energy and utilities, water and wastewater, building automation, oil and gas, and other industrial verticals.

Is it cloud-only?​

No. EmberNet is edge-native and runs on hardware at your site. It can be deployed on-premises, hybrid, or fully managed.

Deployment​

What hardware does it run on?​

Standard x86_64 or ARM64 hardware. It's validated on industrial platforms from OnLogic and Velasea. See System Requirements.

What operating system does it need?​

Edge nodes run EmberRTOS, Fireball Industries' own immutable Linux distribution. You don't install EmberNet onto an existing Linux distribution; the OS and platform are provisioned together.

Do I need three nodes?​

For replicated storage, yes. Cinder defaults to three replicas, and a three-replica volume on a two-node cluster can never reach a healthy state. Single-node deployments work fine for small sites, but understand that you have no replication.

Does it require internet access?​

Edge nodes need outbound HTTPS for mesh enrollment and cloud sync. The platform keeps operating locally through an outage and reconciles when the link returns.

Security​

Does it require a VPN?​

No. The zero-trust mesh removes the need for a site-to-site VPN. See Zero-Trust Networking.

Are any inbound firewall ports required?​

None. All connections are outbound.

Is there a dashboard password?​

No. Sign-in is delegated entirely to your identity provider through SSO, and your identity there determines your role and which tenants you can see. See SSO Integration.

How are certificates managed?​

Issued, rotated, and revoked automatically by the mesh control plane.

Data​

What protocols are supported?​

Directly: OPC UA, MQTT, Modbus TCP/RTU, SNMP, and BACnet/IP. Device Monitor collects metrics over sixteen industrial protocols including EtherNet/IP, PROFINET, DNP3, S7comm, and IEC 61850. See Connectivity.

How long is data retained?​

Defaults are 7 days hot, 30 days warm, and 365 days cold. Hot retention scales with deployment size. See Configuration Reference.

Can I export data?​

Yes, via CSV, the REST API, or streaming over MQTT and webhooks.

Dashboard​

What browsers are supported?​

Chrome 90+, Firefox 85+, Edge 90+, and Safari 14+.

Can I build custom dashboards?​

Not in the console itself. The dashboard is an operations console rather than a charting tool: you choose which live metrics appear in the context strip and how each is drawn, but there is no drag-and-drop chart builder.

For custom time-series charting, deploy Grafana from the App Store. It opens inside the console and reads the same data.

Alerting​

Can I write my own alert rules?​

No. Alert conditions are built in and fixed, which means baseline coverage needs no configuration to work. What you configure is where alerts go. See Alerts & Notifications.

Does it support SMS or PagerDuty?​

Not built in. Email and webhook are the two delivery channels. If you need paging, route the webhook into a system that provides it.

Support​

How do I get help?​

Where do I report issues?​

Contact Fireball Industries Support or email info@fireballz.ai.