Prescient Devices Makes Managing IoT Edge Devices Easy with InfluxDB

By Jason Myers / Use Cases, Developer, Product
May 20, 2022

Prescient Devices focuses on changing the way businesses think about and use edge data and industrial IoT. The company built Prescient Designer, an edge data solutions platform that gives organizations the boost they need to transform their IT/OT processes. Prescient’s products empower data engineers, system integrators, and innovators to easily design and orchestrate edge-to-cloud data solutions.

To help companies with the digital transformation process, Prescient built a SaaS platform called Prescient Designer that empowers users to easily do distributed programming. Designer is based on Node-RED, an open-source project, and features a low-code visual interface. Prescient uses InfluxDB Cloud for Designer storage. The company also built an agent for edge devices, called Prescient Edge that uses InfluxDB OSS.

Why Prescient Devices chose InfluxDB

Prescient chose InfluxDB as the backbone for its platform for several reasons. Prescient developers started using Telegraf for backend data collection and handling for edge devices. That initial use case, the fact that InfluxDB is open source and uses few resources, and customer demand specifically for InfluxDB made adopting it as the go-to time series database an easy decision.

InfluxDB is also designed to handle the scale and speed of data generated from large fleets of edge IoT devices. Prescient users collect everything from basic sensor data, like temperature, humidity, and acceleration, to data from cameras, databases, file, APIs, and industrial equipment. Prescient uses Telegraf’s plugin library to get data from virtually any source. And because InfluxDB is open source, Prescient developers can build custom plugins if one doesn’t exist.

The Prescient ecosystem

The full SaaS ecosystem consists of Prescient Designer and Prescient Edge. Users build, manage, and deploy applications in Designer. The system uses two separate data streams, each with its own security credentials. There is a control stream for application management and deployment, and a data stream that handles user data. Designer connects to Prescient’s broker on one side, and the edge devices connect to the broker from the other end. This system also supports custom brokers for users that must uphold specific compliance requirements, e.g., HIPAA, GDPR.

This system — with its intuitive, visual builder — allows non-developers to build IIoT management applications. The low-code platform enables continuous innovation, accelerates implementation twelve-fold, and lowers costs six-fold, saving companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in development hours.

For more information on Prescient Devices and how they use InfluxDB, check out the full case study.