Why RoboVigil? Built by Automation Engineers, for Automation Engineers
We are Hagen Automation Ltd. After over two decades of designing, installing, programming and maintaining industrial robotic systems, we kept encountering the same problem — and it was getting worse every year.
Engineers Are Spread Thin
Every factory tells the same story: more machines, fewer people to look after them. The maintenance team that used to cover one line now covers three. Experienced automation engineers are retiring faster than they’re being replaced, and the ones still on the floor spend their days firefighting.
Meanwhile the machines are working harder — longer shifts, faster cycles, tighter margins for downtime. A machine running unattended isn’t a saving if someone has to keep walking over to check on it.
Delivering on the Lights-Out Promise
Automation was sold on a promise: machines that run without you. Nights, weekends, unmanned shifts producing while you sleep.
Most factories never fully collect on that promise. Not because the machines can’t run unattended — but because nobody can be confident they are. So lines get stopped at the end of the day shift, or someone stays late, or the weekend run gets scrapped after one bad Monday morning of skips full of scrap.
Lights-out only works when you would know, immediately, if something went wrong. That’s the gap RoboVigil closes. The machine faults at 2 AM, your on-call engineer’s phone buzzes with the alarm code and a camera snapshot, and they decide from their kitchen whether it needs a site visit or can wait until morning.
Information When You Need It — Not Data for Its Own Sake
Most monitoring products are built around collecting everything: data lakes, wall-to-wall dashboards, weekly reports nobody reads. That’s monitoring for its own sake, and it generates work instead of removing it.
An engineer who’s already stretched doesn’t need another screen to watch. They need to know that cell 4 has faulted, what the alarm code is, and what the machine looks like right now. RoboVigil delivers exactly that to your phone the moment it happens — and stays silent the rest of the time. If you haven’t heard from it, things are running.
The performance data is all there when you want it — cycle times, fault frequency, downtime causes, shift comparisons — for the decisions that need it. But the product is built around the alert, not the dashboard.
The Problem Behind the Problem
Proper oversight existed long before RoboVigil — at a price. Traditional SCADA systems cost £10,000–£100,000+ to deploy, with dedicated hardware, complex installations and ongoing specialist support that SME manufacturers couldn’t justify. And every vendor wanted to trap customers in their own proprietary monitoring ecosystem: mixing ABB robots with Siemens PLCs and FANUC controllers meant three separate interfaces, if you could get them to talk at all. And you still need a human paying attention.
The engineers who most needed monitoring were exactly the ones who couldn’t afford it.
That’s why we built RoboVigil.
What We Built Instead
RoboVigil works with what you already have. It talks to your robots directly using the manufacturers’ own interfaces, and supports OPC-UA and MQTT for everything else — one dashboard, every machine, no vendor lock-in.
It’s software-only: no hardware to install, no edge devices, no on-site servers. Your existing router and off-the-shelf IP cameras, connected through an encrypted WireGuard tunnel with nothing exposed to the internet and no ports opened on your firewall.
And it’s phone-first. Few SMEs can afford dedicated staff sat watching processes, and a SCADA terminal in an office doesn’t help anyone on the shop floor. Everyone who needs it gets direct access to every machine — visually, statistically, immediately.
£150 per machine per month plus VAT. Monitor one critical machine, then expand as you see value. No minimum contract, no seat licences, no pricing calculations based on data points.
Built on Real Automation Experience
Every feature in RoboVigil comes from actual problems we’ve encountered in real manufacturing environments. The alert prioritisation system exists because we’ve been woken at 3 AM by false alarms. The camera integration works the way it does because we know what operators actually need to see when something goes wrong.
This isn’t theoretical software built by people who’ve never worked on a factory floor. It’s the monitoring system we wished existed during over two decades of automation projects.
The machines are ready to work harder. Are you ready to let them?