Introduction

What is Open Gauge?

Open Gauge is a self-hosted platform for managing industrial sensors, instrumentation assets, calibration records, calibration coefficients, certificates, and traceability data. It's built for laboratories, industrial sites, and engineering organizations that need to know — with evidence — that a measurement can be trusted.

Open Gauge keeps track of:

• The asset registry: every sensor and data-acquisition (DAQ) device you own, its specifications, and where it's physically located.
• Calibration history: every calibration event, as an immutable, append-only record — never overwritten, never silently corrected.
• Measurement uncertainty, computed per JCGM 100:2008 (GUM) and reported per ISO/IEC 17025:2017.
• Certificates, procedures, sites/locations, and an audit trail of who changed what and when.

Who this documentation is for

• Lab technicians and calibration engineers — the Sensors, Locations, Procedures, and Calibration sections walk through the day-to-day workflows.
• Metrologists — the Calibration and Health scoring sections cover the full mathematical basis: curve fitting, uncertainty budgets, decision rules, and worked numerical examples.
• IT / DevOps deploying Open Gauge on-site — see Self-hosting.
• Developers integrating with Open Gauge — see the API Reference, generated directly from the live OpenAPI schema.

How Open Gauge is organized

Open Gauge models a simple hierarchy:

Organization
 └─ Locations (site → building → laboratory → ...)
     └─ Assets (sensors, DAQs)
         └─ Sensor channels (one per measured physical quantity)
             └─ Calibrations (immutable history, one row per event)

Read Data model & concepts next for the full picture, or jump straight to Adding a sensor if you already have Open Gauge running and just want to register your first instrument.