ThingWorx Kepware OPC Monitoring
Use This InfluxDB Integration for FreeThingWorx Kepware is a leading OPC server and gateway application, connecting legacy industrial assets with applications, databases, and cloud services in a powerful peer-to-peer manner. It provides an extensible, interoperable network through which sensor, actuator, and other operational data from the plant or factory can be shared in real time.
With out-of-the-box connectivity for thousands of legacy and modern devices, ThingWorx Kepware Server enables quick time to value for your Digital Transformation initiatives. 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.
Why use the ThingWorx Kepware integration?
Sometimes you want to stream your OPC tag data directly to InfluxDB for monitoring, alerting, and visualization. Maybe you've tired of your process historian's antiquated architecture and user interface, or maybe you're looking to escape the inflated costs and closed ecosystems of a historian-centered data strategy. Collecting and storing tag data, at scale, with ThingWorx Kepware and InfluxDB is easy, fast, and inexpensive to implement.
How to collect data from Industrial IoT devices with ThingWorx Kepware
Modern IIoT and Industry 4.0 applications are typically built around one or more messaging or data exchange platforms. OPC, which includes OPC-DA, OPC-UA and oftentimes OPC-AE, is most common on the plant floor and within an industrial organization's data center. MQTT is less specific to OT than OPC but provides low-latency methods to pass data between assets and applications that fit well in a hybrid asset/application network. RESTful APIs are a web-first technology designed for application to application or client-server interactions, and fit well within edge to cloud architectures or those built and managed by IT or web developers.
Fortunately, ThingWorx Kepware, InfluxDB and InfluxDB cloud support all of these methods, providing flexibility and support for your chosen integration.
MQTT Client
Use the Kepware IoT Gateway Advanced Plugin to stream industrial data directly to a MQTT broker of your choice, or use one from an InfluxData partner like HiveMQ. The Telegraf MQTT connector will monitor one or all of your MQTT topics and automatically store the data sent to those topics by Kepware. Bonus points for using InfluxDB tasks to process that data and write it back to the broker for Kepware to integrate with other downstream operational applications!
REST Client
Also using the Kepware IoT Gateway Advanced Plugin, you can process and reformat your OPC tag data into Line Protocol, and send to InfluxDB on change, poll interval, or per tag-side logic. This approach also allows you to enrich the tag data with InfluxDB Tags and Fields which will make all future analytics and visualizations in InfluxDB super-powered.
Kepware OPC Server
Connect directly to Kepware's OPC server with the Telegraf OPC plugin. This is for specific advanced users who need to leverage OPC namespacing within InfluxDB and are willing to take the additional time to configure and manage the OPC connection.
Key metrics to send to InfluxDB
Some of the important metrics that you could use to proactively monitor your industrial devices and processes:
- Tag data: Temperatures, Pressures, Widget Counts - any sensor, actuator, system or device tag in Kepware can be historized to InfluxDB.
- Advanced Tag data: Output from calculations, aggregations, and evaluations performed within the KepServerEX application.
- Downstream PLCs, RTUs, HMIs, databases and OPC servers. Kepware can act as the gateway between your OT applications and devices and InfluxDB or InfluxDB Cloud.
