Abstract: This patent application describes (a) software to help people design monitoring systems and (b) methods to facilitate enhanced data flow management (including from large numbers of simultaneous sources), diagnostic and statistical analyses based on novel concepts of data compression using statistical state space techniques. The design assistance is structured around known but not widely practiced procedures such as documented in Graves, Rens and Rutz (2011). For data flow management, the present invention may transmit and store an estimated state space model only when the last stored model is not adequate to predict recent observations. It may also transmit and store outliers and samples of regular observations. This unique data storage format requires new methods for data analysis to properly extract the information contained therein.