A Platform Gaining Momentum: Announcing New InfluxDB Features for Industrial IoT

By Brian Gilmore / Product, Use Cases, Developer
Feb 15, 2022

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Data – specifically time series data – continues to be the key ingredient for successful digital transformation. No matter the industry, time series data helps companies understand the activities and output of people, processes and technologies impacting their business. The effective management and use of time series data has emerged as the best path towards this goal. Nowhere is this more apparent than when IoT or industrial devices and applications are part of the technology landscape.

In IIoT, time series data can be used to detect operational anomalies, like storage tank leaks and changes in wind direction. With InfluxDB, this data can trigger alerts to inform operators and engineers when anomalies or problematic conditions occur. Other IIoT use cases which require time series data include predictive maintenance, optimized traffic routing, and enhanced water conservation.

We built InfluxDB to handle the variety, volume and velocity of IoT data, making it an ideal foundation for IoT and IIoT use cases. As our business grows, we find our platform at the center of the “IoT Insights” value proposition, with almost a half-million installs of the InfluxDB platform to date. We’re confident that the substance of our solutions and the community that supports them foster this level of adoption in the IoT and IIoT spaces. Check out our announcement about how we’re making an impact in IoT and the new features we’re rolling out to support developers, our community members, and our customers and partners in that field. Here are a few highlights to get you started:

InfluxDB dashboarding capabilities - sensor data

InfluxDB includes powerful dashboarding tools for visualizing and analyzing sensor data.

InfluxDB enhancements to build IoT applications

Today we’re announcing new capabilities to store IoT data at the edge, to process and analyze that data locally, and to push raw, aggregated, and otherwise actionable data to a network of InfluxDB hubs in the datacenter or cloud. Together, these features expedite the development of IoT and IIoT solutions and enable accelerated insights for engineers working with industrial data at the edge. These updates include:

New and expanded support for edge analytics

Developers can now perform analytics at the edge, which shifts processing loads to the edge and increases the efficiency of overall data management and processing for large, distributed architectures. Developers can now also replicate data generated from an instance of InfluxDB at the edge to InfluxDB Cloud. This gives developers more control over how to process and handle high velocity and high-resolution data. The replication update makes it easier to collect and view data in a central location, and to perform additional analytic processing on both finite and unified data sets. You can learn more about working with InfluxDB to collect and analyze data from edge devices in this video.

Expanded flexibility for resource-constrained edge devices

We’ve added a new InfluxDB feature that allows developers to distribute processed data with custom payloads to thousands of devices all at once from a single Flux script. This is part of our broader focus on reducing the memory footprint of our edge-capable software components, while also making them more modular. We want developers to feel confident and comfortable using our databases, Telegraf agents, and client libraries, and SDKs in situations with limited compute, storage, and network resources.

Contextualize IoT data across multiple sources

We know that MQTT is a key protocol for IoT and IIoT use cases, so we improved our support for data residing in MQTT brokers. Customers can use Telegraf, our collection and processing agent, to connect to these key data sources. Keep an eye out for future announcements related to cloud-native MQTT collection, a hosted service connecting your InfluxDB Cloud directly to your cloud or on-premises MQTT brokers. Join our community Slack channel to be first to know when we’re looking for beta testers and early adopters!

InfluxDB capabilities - MQTT conveniences

New MQTT conveniences include parsing of topic names and message payloads, as well as new actions for sending information and setpoints to thousands of devices via an MQTT broker.

Check out today’s announcement for more information on the new features we’ve built and how they’re helping our IoT customers be successful.

A growing ecosystem of IIoT partners

We’ve expanded our partner ecosystem with a host of new technology partners and integrations, connecting the leading Industrial and IoT platforms and middleware software with InfluxDB. PTC ThingWorx, Inductive Automation’s Ignition, Bosch ctrlX, PTC Kepware, HighByte’s Intelligence Hub, Akenza, Cogent Data Hub and many more now support direct connection to InfluxDB’s hybrid edge-cloud APIs for time series data storage. Several of these integrations also open the opportunity for their customers to analyze and visualize the time series data stored within InfluxDB as part of their own applications.

Check out our tech partners page for additional information on our partner ecosystem, and reach out if you would like to join.

Time series in action

Along with our success in open source and edge adoption, we’ve built and extended commercial relationships with several organizations leading the Industrial, Enterprise, and Consumer categories of the Internet of Things. A few examples:

    • Tesla uses InfluxDB as a key component of its internal and customer-facing analytics time series data pipeline for its consumer and commercial solar power solutions.
    • Rolls-Royce Power Systems uses InfluxDB to improve operational efficiency at its industrial engine manufacturing facility. They collect sensor data from the engines of ships, trains, planes, and other industrial equipment to monitor performance in real time, identify trends, and to predict maintenance needs.
    • Graphite Energy helps its clients collect industrial sensor data about energy usage, fuel consumption, temperature, solar panels, wind farms, process steam and air dryers. Graphite Energy chose InfluxDB over a legacy data historian to collect IIoT data used to monitor its zero-emission energy platform. You can read more about our work with Graphite Energy in today's blog.

New InfluxDB capabilities join existing geospatial and time series features

New InfluxDB capabilities join existing geospatial and time series features to expand relevance for IoT solution and application builders.

We’re seeing new adoption in Energy, Transportation, Manufacturing, Consumer Goods and beyond. All of this is a good sign for the future, and we’re honored to be a part of this digital revolution. If you’d like to join us, sign up for an InfluxDB Cloud trial or download one of our open source distributions.