What Ask Argus Actually Is
Ask Argus is not a chatbot. It’s not a search function. It’s not a dashboard with a text input.
It’s an AI that has read every record in your ArgusIQ deployment — every sensor reading, every maintenance work order, every alert event, every asset identity record — and can answer questions about what’s in those records in natural language.
The distinction matters. A search function finds records that match keywords. Ask Argus understands questions and synthesizes answers from the data. “Which motors on Press Line 2 are showing early-warning patterns?” isn’t a keyword search. It’s a question that requires knowing what a motor is, what Press Line 2 is, what early-warning patterns look like based on historical maintenance events, and how to identify which current sensor readings match those patterns.
Ask Argus can answer it. In seconds.
The Data Ask Argus Can Access
Ask Argus draws from the complete ArgusIQ data model through MCP servers:
- Asset Hub: Digital twin records, baselines, health scores, sensor telemetry (current and historical), asset identities, equipment specifications, operating hours
- CMMS: Work orders (open, in-progress, completed), maintenance history, PM schedules, parts used, labor hours, technician assignments
- Alarm Engine: Alert history, active alerts, escalation records, acknowledgment logs
- Space Hub: Asset locations, zone assignments, floor plan layouts
- Ticketing: Open tickets, SLA status, service request history
An answer to any question draws from whichever of these data sources is relevant. A question about maintenance cost per asset type pulls from CMMS. A question about current alert status pulls from the Alarm Engine. A question that connects the two — “which assets with high maintenance costs are also showing degraded health scores right now?” — pulls from both and synthesizes the combined view.
Operations Monitoring Queries
Operations teams use Ask Argus for the daily situational awareness questions that normally require dashboard navigation or manual data review:
“What assets are currently in alert status in Building A?”
Ask Argus returns a list of assets in Building A with active alerts, their current readings, and the alert condition. The operations supervisor gets the answer without opening the alert management view, filtering by building, and reviewing each active alert.
“How many assets have gone offline in the past 24 hours?”
Ask Argus queries the alarm history for connectivity alerts in the past 24-hour window and returns the count and list of affected assets.
“Which areas of the facility had the most alert activity last week?”
Ask Argus aggregates alert events by Space Hub zone for the past week and returns a ranked list — giving operations managers a view of where operational issues are concentrating.
“Show me the trend for Motor 14B’s bearing temperature over the past 30 days.”
Ask Argus retrieves the time-series data for the specified asset and measurement, summarizes the trend pattern, identifies whether the trend is within or outside the baseline range, and notes any recent alert events in the same time window.
Maintenance Planning Queries
Maintenance supervisors and planners use Ask Argus for the questions that drive PM scheduling, resource allocation, and repair prioritization:
“Which assets are due for PM service in the next 30 days?”
Ask Argus queries CMMS PM schedules for upcoming due dates within the specified window and returns a prioritized list with the service type required for each.
“What parts did we use most frequently in maintenance this quarter?”
Ask Argus aggregates parts usage from CMMS work order records and returns the top parts by usage frequency — useful for inventory planning and identifying recurring failure patterns.
“Which motors on Press Line 2 have had more than 2 bearing replacements in the past 18 months?”
Ask Argus queries CMMS maintenance history filtered by asset type, location (Press Line 2), work type (bearing replacement), and time window — returning the list of motors that meet the criteria and their individual replacement dates.
“What is the average time from alert detection to work order closure for the maintenance team this month?”
Ask Argus correlates Alarm Engine events with CMMS work order creation timestamps and closure timestamps, calculating the average response time metric for the specified period.
Failure Pattern Recognition Queries
Ask Argus can identify patterns across the operational history that manual review would miss:
“Are any assets currently showing the sensor signature that preceded bearing failures in Q2?”
Ask Argus examines the Q2 bearing failures in CMMS, identifies the sensor readings in Asset Hub in the periods before each failure (what the vibration, temperature, and current readings looked like 24–96 hours before the failure event), and compares that pattern against current readings for all assets of the same type. Assets whose current readings match the historical pre-failure pattern are flagged.
This is early-warning maintenance prediction from accumulated history — no separate AI model required, no training dataset preparation. The historical record in ArgusIQ is the dataset. Ask Argus is the query interface.
“Which asset type has the most unpredictable failure timing — where PM calendar scheduling is least effective?”
Ask Argus analyzes CMMS maintenance records grouped by asset type, comparing actual maintenance event timing against scheduled PM dates. Asset types where maintenance events occur frequently between scheduled PMs (indicating that calendar PM isn’t catching failures in time) are identified.
“Show me maintenance events where the post-repair sensor reading didn’t confirm resolution within 24 hours.”
Ask Argus queries CMMS for maintenance events marked complete and checks whether the relevant sensor readings returned to within-baseline range within 24 hours of closure. Work orders where post-repair readings remained anomalous indicate repairs that may not have fully resolved the underlying condition.
Compliance Documentation Queries
For operations with regulatory documentation requirements, Ask Argus generates the structured summaries that compliance teams need:
“Generate a cold chain summary for Zone 3 for the past 30 days.”
Ask Argus retrieves temperature readings for all refrigeration units in Zone 3 for the specified period, identifies all excursion events (duration, maximum temperature, start time, end time), retrieves the acknowledgment and response records from CMMS, and formats the summary as a structured compliance report.
“How many LDAR inspection work orders were completed in Q3 vs. Q4 this year?”
Ask Argus queries CMMS for work orders classified as LDAR inspection by quarter and returns the comparison.
“Show me all assets with calibration due in the next 60 days, grouped by calibration lab.”
Ask Argus queries Asset Hub calibration records, identifies assets with next calibration dates within 60 days, and groups them by the calibration provider assigned to each asset — giving the calibration coordinator a pre-sorted list for scheduling.
Strategic Decision Support Queries
Operations directors and managers use Ask Argus for the longer-horizon questions that inform capital and operational decisions:
“What is the maintenance cost per production unit for each production line this year?”
Ask Argus aggregates CMMS labor costs, parts costs, and downtime from work orders associated with assets on each production line, normalizes by production counts from the MES integration, and returns the cost-per-unit comparison.
“Which facility has the best equipment health scores across our three plants?”
Ask Argus aggregates Asset Hub health scores by facility, calculates the distribution of health scores (mean, percentage of assets above 80), and returns the comparative ranking.
“What would our maintenance cost look like if we shifted the asset category with the most calendar-PM events to condition-based PM scheduling?”
Ask Argus estimates the change in PM event frequency based on current sensor health data for the specified asset category — identifying assets that are being serviced on calendar schedule when their health scores indicate they don’t need it yet.
What Ask Argus Is Not
Ask Argus answers questions about what the data says. It does not:
- Make decisions. The answer to “which assets need attention?” is information. The decision about which to prioritize is still made by the maintenance supervisor.
- Generate new information. If a record doesn’t exist in ArgusIQ, Ask Argus cannot answer questions about it. An operation with incomplete maintenance records will get answers that reflect those gaps.
- Operate the equipment. Ask Argus is read-only against the operational data. It doesn’t send commands, adjust setpoints, or initiate actions.
Every answer includes citations — the source records that Ask Argus drew from. Operations teams can verify the answer against the underlying data. The AI interprets and synthesizes; the data is the source of truth.
Talk to our team about deploying Ask Argus in your ArgusIQ environment.