Telemetry is the reason an operator in Midland can see the pressure at a wellhead 80 miles away in near real time. It is the automated collection and transmission of measurements from remote field sites to a central location - the nervous system of distributed oil and gas operations. This guide explains what telemetry is, how it works, and how it underpins SCADA.
Telemetry in plain English: Telemetry is the automated measurement of data at a remote site and its transmission to a central control point over a communications link. In oil and gas, telemetry carries wellhead, tank, and pipeline readings from the field to a SCADA system for monitoring and alarming.
A telemetry chain starts at the sensor - a pressure or temperature transmitter, a level gauge, a flow meter. A field device (an RTU or flow computer) reads the sensor, timestamps the value, and transmits it over a communications link: cellular is now the workhorse, with satellite for the most remote sites and licensed radio still common on established networks. At the other end, a SCADA system receives, stores, and displays the data.
Because field comms are imperfect, good telemetry is built to tolerate outages - buffering data locally and forwarding it when the link returns (store-and-forward), and reporting by exception to conserve bandwidth and power.
Telemetry and SCADA are often used interchangeably, but they are layers of one system. Telemetry is specifically the remote measurement and transmission; SCADA is the supervisory platform that consumes the telemetry to provide dashboards, alarming, historization, and remote control. You cannot have distributed SCADA without telemetry underneath it.
Traditionally, telemetry terminated at an on-premise SCADA server polling each remote site. Cloud-native platforms change the endpoint: field devices publish or are polled into a managed cloud service reachable from any browser, which removes the server room and makes new-site onboarding fast. Merobix reads telemetry from RTUs and flow computers over DNP3, Modbus, and MQTT Sparkplug B and delivers it to a web-native platform, with edge buffering so lossy cellular links do not lose data.
Telemetry is automatically measuring something at a remote location and sending that measurement to a central point over a communications link. In oil and gas it carries wellhead, tank, and pipeline readings from the field to a SCADA system.
Telemetry is specifically the remote measurement and transmission of data. SCADA is the supervisory system that consumes telemetry to provide dashboards, alarming, history, and control. Telemetry is a layer within a distributed SCADA system.
Cellular is now the most common, with satellite for very remote sites and licensed radio on many established networks. Good telemetry tolerates outages through store-and-forward buffering and report-by-exception.
Report-by-exception means a field device transmits a value only when it changes beyond a set threshold, instead of on a fixed schedule. It conserves bandwidth and battery power - important on cellular and satellite links.
This page references the protocol specifications published by the organizations below. Editions, product capabilities, and documentation change over time - confirm current requirements and specifications directly with the source.
Last reviewed: July 27, 2026. Merobix is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by these organizations; their names are used only to identify the standards and products discussed.
Merobix collects field telemetry over cellular with edge buffering - no lost data on lossy links, no on-premise server.