Optimizing Industrial IoT Performance with PTC ThingWorx and InfluxDB

This free tech paper from InfluxData and PTC provides strategies to help you achieve success at scale with your industrial data solution.

This tech paper includes:

The challenges of increased data production in industrial settings
Best practices for IoT testing and building for scale
Why time series databases factor into industrial data solutions
How to unlock performance gains with ThingWorx and InfluxDB

Why a purpose-built time series database?

Sensor data is all time-stamped to help you understand how your processes and equipment are doing over time to help further innovation and improvement.

Monitoring dashboard - InfluxDB Template

What is the InfluxData IIoT monitoring solution?

The industrial world has a long history of modernizing processes in order to keep production running efficiently and safely while minimizing downtime. Yet many are locked in established data historian solutions that are costly and lack the methods needed to provide innovation and interoperability.

In contrast, InfluxDB — the open source time series database — inherently provides diverse design perspectives not available from a single software vendor. It provides the freedom to integrate with other solutions and allows you to adapt the code to fit your ever-changing system requirements.

Scalability

Collecting event data from your equipment is just the beginning. True digital transformation requires more data sources and more analysis of the combined data to gain a better understanding of your systems. InfluxDB is a high-performance data store written specifically for time series data. It allows for high throughput ingest, compression and real-time querying.

Open

With the availability of so many open source tools, operators are no longer required to purchase arcane closed source solutions. Instead, they can look to building their own data historian replacements or buy a ready-made solution that is based on open source. This provides the operator with the freedom to quickly innovate and never be locked in to a single solution that could easily and quickly become obsolete.

Built for developers

InfluxDB provides write and query capabilities with a command-line interface, a built-in HTTP API, a set of client libraries (e.g., Go, Python, and JavaScript) and Telegraf plugins for common data formats such as OPC-UA, ModBus, MQTT and more. In addition, the Influx Community is diverse and highly motivated, making contributions in code, documentation, and advocacy for the InfluxDB and Telegraf projects.

Integrations

AMQP Telegraf Plugin — The AMQP Consumer Telegraf Plugin provides consumers the ability to receive streaming data through an AMQP 0-9-1 compatible broker, like RabbitMQ. The metrics are read from a topic exchange using the queue binding_key.

ModBus Telegraf Plugin — The Modbus Telegraf Plugin collects Discrete Inputs, Coils, Input Registers and Holding Registers via Modbus TCP or Modbus RTU/ASCII. In the configuration setting, you can identify the addresses of the Modbus device on the bus, the range, timeouts, retries, etc. to collect the measurements directly from the equipment, from the SCADA, or from the automation systems.

MQTT Telegraf Plugin — The MQTT Consumer Telegraf Input Plugin reads from specified MQTT topics and adds messages to InfluxDB. Messages are in the Telegraf input data formats. You can gather and graph metrics from your IoT devices with the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol — a simple and lightweight messaging protocol ideal for IoT devices.

OPC-UA Telegraf Plugin — The OPC-UA Telegraf Plugin helps you gather metrics from client devices using the OPC-UA protocol. Telegraf is that it has support for many of the protocols used in the industrial use case, so using this plugin spares you from having to pay excessive fees to build collectors to gather information into your traditional historian solution.

Sensor Telegraf Plugin — The Sensor Telegraf Plugin can help you collect sensor metrics with any sensor executable from the Linux-monitoring (lm-sensor) package. lm_sensors is a free open source software tool for Linux that provides tools and drivers for monitoring temperatures, voltage, humidity and fans.

Kepware Integration - ThingWorx Kepware Server simplifies the challenges of collecting and preparing data from complex, heterogeneous environments with a connectivity solution built for enterprise-wide IoT scalability.

Featured partner

PTC empowers global manufacturers to realize double-digit impact with software solutions that enable them to accelerate product and service innovation, improve operational efficiency, and increase workforce productivity. In combination with an extensive partner network, PTC provides customers flexibility in how its technology can be deployed to drive digital transformation – on premises, in the cloud, or via its pure SaaS platform. At PTC, we don’t just imagine a better world; we enable it. Visit PTC to learn more.