I used a non contact infrared thermometer "gun" back in the 1990's for just such a purpose.

We would "read" the bearings and gear boxes after 3 hours of our post weekend startup and chart the temps. You could see when the trend changed easily , with out going into spc. Our culprits were bearings on drives for our wheelabrators (shotblasters).

We eliminated over half of our unscheduled downtime with this technique.

We tried using it for circuit boards on the controller for one of our draw lines, Many failures, but the resolution was lacking, i'll bet that the camera that you are considering would do a better job on that.

milo