3. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
3.2 Tools
Software programs that can be found in a lot of IIoT implementations
Although the field of Industrial IoT is quite new, there are already a couple of tools that can be encountered very often. A lot of these tools are whitelabeled by big players (and sometimes they put a price tag on it as well!).
Node-RED
Node-RED is a programming tool for connecting hardware devices, APIs and online services
It provides a browser-based editor which can be used by simply dragging so-called nodes on the screen. These nodes standardize function and require minimal adjustments to create data flows.
It is widely used by big players like Siemens (SIMATIC IOT 2000, Siemens Visual Flow Creator), Schneider Electric and Weidmüller.
Additionally, there are a lot of manufacturing specific plugins for it, for example:
See also our blog article: Node-RED in Industrial IoT: a growing standard
We also have Node-RED articles in our guide section, which offer useful tutorial and how-tos to help you through Node-RED.
Grafana
Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and understand your data.
It was originally designed for IT monitoring tasks, like visualizing the CPU utilization of your Kubernetes clusters. However, because the visualization is so good, a lot of companies are using it to visualize their IIoT data as well.
If you want to take a more intricate look at what you can do with Grafana in combination with the United Manufacturing Hub, you can take a look at the following video, where we show you how to set up a dashboard with lots of important information.
We have a Grafana articles in our guide section, which hopefully helps you with getting started with that useful tool.
Time-series database
A time-series database allows efficient storage and querying of time-series data.
For example InfluxDB or TimescaleDB. See also our blog article: Why we chose timescaleDB over InfluxDB
United Manufacturing Hub
The United Manufacturing Hub bundles the mentioned tools & technologies. For a general introduction, take a look at the main page
