PTC ThingWorx

Purpose-built for the Industrial Internet of Things, ThingWorx provides end-to-end capabilities to connect devices, build robust IIoT solutions, and create compelling end-user experiences that are simple to develop, easy to implement, and accelerate time-to-value. With ThingWorx, enterprises and an ecosystem of partners capitalize on the promise of IIoT technology today and drive the future of innovation.

Get the Guide: Optimizing Performance with ThingWorx with InfluxDB

InfluxData and PTC

PTC ThingWorx and InfluxDB

PTC empowers global manufacturers with software solutions that enable them to accelerate product and service innovations, improve operational efficiency and increase workforce productivity. Working together, InfluxData and PTC bring an open source platform built specifically for handling time series data to the ThingWorx ecosystem of IoT developers. Specifically:

  • Monitoring, alerting and notification applications for ThingWorx- connected devices and sensors
  • IoT applications supporting millions of events per second, providing new business value around predictive maintenance and real-time alerting and control
  • Real-time analytics applications that are focused on streaming data and anomaly detection

Delivering twice the speed

PTC and InfluxData have been collaborating together since 2018. PTC developed a ‘connector’ between ThingWorx and InfluxDB to facilitate integration between the platforms. According to some PTC customers, InfluxDB makes Thingworx “at least twice as fast with greater improvements in some cases” relative to previous configurations.

The key benefits of using InfluxDB with PTC ThingWorx are:

  • Ability to handle significant ingestion rates
  • Perform real-time queries across large datasets in a non-blocking manner
  • Downsampling and retention policies to reduce storage cost and optimize the engine
  • Perform complex, time-bound queries to extract meaningful insights from the data

Key resources

Using InfluxDB as the ThingWorx Persistence Provider

All new instances of PTC ThingWorx hosted in PTC’s Microsoft Azure cloud environment will automatically use InfluxDB Cloud as the data store. PTC recommends using InfluxDB as the persistence provider in ThingWorx if your system intensively deals with time series data and your implementation heavily depends on value streams or streams for persistence/retrieval of data.

InfluxDB is a high-performance data store written specifically for time series data and allows for high throughput ingest, compression and real-time querying of that same data. InfluxDB is used as a data store for any use case involving large amounts of time-stamped data, including DevOps monitoring, log data, application metrics, IoT sensor data and real-time analytics. It also provides other capabilities, including Data Retention Policies (RP) and so on. The enterprise edition of InfluxDB offers high availability and a highly scalable clustering solution for time series data needs.

PTC-Architecture-Diagram

InfluxDB Enterprise and ThingWorx Starting Landscape

InfluxDB is a supported database to manage ThingWorx Streams and ValueStreams in development and production systems. It is not supported to manage the ThingWorx model and therefore paired with PostgreSQL. InfluxDB is used to provide higher ingestion rates for large amounts of transactional (runtime) data and recommended by PTC for this purpose. The InfluxPersistenceProviderPackage is available as part of default installation for PostgreSQL, MSSQL or Azure SQL.

Learn More

Unlocking the Power of Industrial Data

In this session PTC shares their experience, partnering with InfluxData, to help companies extract value from their IoT data and maximize the performance of their monitoring systems to increase operational capabilities and stay competitive.

ThingWorx Long-Term Data Storage with InfluxDB

Customers using ThingWorx and the Manufacturing Solutions often need to store property data longer than the Solutions default to. These customers are recommended to use InfluxDB, and this presentation covers the key considerations for moving to InfluxDB vs the standard ThingWorx value streams.
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