A thermal monitoring system includes thermal monitoring devices that generate sensor data including thermal images depicting monitored elements (e.g. of an electrical switchgear system). The sensor data for all monitoring devices installed at a local deployment is collected by a gateway device, and relevant data from multiple local deployments is further aggregated by a cloud management system for further analysis. New event triggering rules determining how the thermal monitoring devices filter or record the sensor data are generated based on the aggregated data during a continuous learning process. The system detects patterns in the sensor data for the monitoring devices and/or local deployments as a whole and tracks deviations from these patterns, improving the accuracy of the event detection over time.