A remote water heater monitoring system is configured to communicate with a plurality of client water heaters over a network. The system processes received data related to the operation of the plurality of client water heaters and identifies one or more baseline trends over time related to water heater performance and/or water heater reliability using the received data from one or more of the client water heaters and identifies one or more abnormalities in the operation of a particular one of the client water heaters based on the baseline trends. An alert is generated for one or more of the abnormalities in the operation of the particular one of the client water heaters and is associated with a corresponding client account.