Projects

Containerized industrial IOT power solution:

Openbyte designed and deployed a fully containerised industrial power monitoring system for a commercial facility client, integrating power meters via Modbus over RS485 into a real-time data pipeline built on IOT devices, time series database, and visualisation. The solution captures three-phase voltage, current, active and reactive power, and cumulative energy across multiple meters — polling every 60 seconds — and surfaces this data through custom dashboards that include Eskom time-of-use tariff analysis for peak, standard, and off-peak cost breakdowns. Deployed using Docker Containers and Zabbix health monitoring, the system gives the client continuous visibility into their energy consumption, power quality, and operational costs, with a scalable architecture ready to replicate across additional sites.

Sovereign document management migration: financial services

Openbyte designed and deployed a fully self-hosted document management solution for a financial services client, migrating them off cloud-based SharePoint onto an on-premises Proxmox virtualisation environment running Nextcloud. The solution preserves the collaborative workflows the client relied on, including team and group folder structures and real-time document co-editing, through an integrated OnlyOffice server that provides a familiar interface for users transitioning from a Microsoft ecosystem. Two-factor authentication was enforced across all user accounts, meeting the heightened security and data sovereignty requirements typical of financial services environments. The result is a private, internally controlled platform that gives the client full ownership of their data and the flexibility to scale storage and users as the business grows, with cloud licensing costs replaced by a once-off infrastructure investment.

Local eTenders mirror with full-text search and alerting

Openbyte developed a locally hosted government tender intelligence platform addressing a well-known pain point with the national eTenders database: slow response times and data loss on large queries. The system periodically clones the government database, running consistency checks to detect and recover dropped records, and loads the verified data into a locally served database with FTS5 full-text search for fast, reliable browsing. Users can configure keyword, category, and region-based alert profiles that trigger email notifications when matching tenders are published, keeping procurement teams informed regardless of upstream reliability.

Lightweight terminal log analyser for live and offline diagnostics

Openbyte developed a terminal log analysis tool built entirely on Python’s standard library, deployable directly onto affected systems with no installation steps required. This makes it practical for triage on production systems where observability infrastructure is unavailable and adding third-party tooling is restricted. The tool supports live log tailing, Docker container log streaming, and named pipe ingestion alongside static file analysis, with automatic log type detection across common formats including Nginx, syslog, MariaDB, and Caddy. A built-in stats engine provides real-time frequency analysis, activity histograms, and field-level breakdowns, while regex-capable full-text search, invertible level and field filters, and click-to-filter interactivity allow rapid narrowing of large log volumes. Log type behaviour and highlighting rules are defined in JSON templates, making it straightforward to extend support to custom application formats.