HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.5: Where industrial data meets IT infrastructure
John Harrington
is the Chief Product Officer of HighByte, focused on defining the company’s business and product strategy. His areas of responsibility include product management, customer success, partner success, and go-to-market strategy. John is passionate about delivering technology that improves productivity and safety in manufacturing and industrial environments. John received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a Master of Business Administration from Babson College.
"We're not in Kansas anymore." In fact, we’re in Chicago at IMTS, the largest North American Industrial Technology show of the year, where we’re announcing the release of HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.5! The latest version has come a long way since its original release in early 2020. What began as a data hub for OPC to MQTT has evolved into an Intelligence Hub that truly lives up to its name. The Intelligence Hub satisfies real, complex business use cases and enables enterprise IT management of industrial data.
Manufacturers have realized that publishing 750,000 data tags (or even 75,000 data tags) straight to the cloud at a 1 second rate does not solve real business problems for the enterprise and often creates a data swamp. Instead, industrial data must be collected, transformed, aggregated, and delivered to the cloud as curated data payloads. In HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.5, we’ve provided unparalleled support for Microsoft Azure with the addition of Azure IoT Edge connectivity, support for Azure IoT Central, and the ability to import DTDL models from Azure Digital Twins. We’ve also also added support for third-party JavaScript functions, input cache management, instance referencing, and many more features to improve the coverage of more complex use cases that customers need to solve.
As industrial data has become the major source of data for the broader business to drive improvement and new lines of revenue, the systems feeding the cloud for these initiatives must fall within the enterprise IT infrastructure. With the latest release of the Intelligence Hub, we’ve added support for Active Directory and improved ability to monitor and alert when data is bad or stale and when flow performance is poor.
This post provides an overview of the release, highlighting new connectivity, monitoring, management, and advanced use case capabilities. Let’s take a look.
Manufacturers have realized that publishing 750,000 data tags (or even 75,000 data tags) straight to the cloud at a 1 second rate does not solve real business problems for the enterprise and often creates a data swamp. Instead, industrial data must be collected, transformed, aggregated, and delivered to the cloud as curated data payloads. In HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.5, we’ve provided unparalleled support for Microsoft Azure with the addition of Azure IoT Edge connectivity, support for Azure IoT Central, and the ability to import DTDL models from Azure Digital Twins. We’ve also also added support for third-party JavaScript functions, input cache management, instance referencing, and many more features to improve the coverage of more complex use cases that customers need to solve.
As industrial data has become the major source of data for the broader business to drive improvement and new lines of revenue, the systems feeding the cloud for these initiatives must fall within the enterprise IT infrastructure. With the latest release of the Intelligence Hub, we’ve added support for Active Directory and improved ability to monitor and alert when data is bad or stale and when flow performance is poor.
This post provides an overview of the release, highlighting new connectivity, monitoring, management, and advanced use case capabilities. Let’s take a look.
Connectivity
Microsoft Azure has continued to add and improve functionality for onboarding industrial data and leveraging it within the Azure environment. Azure IoT Edge provides an edge-deployed, cloud-managed environment to run applications and ingest data, enabling users to offload AI and analytics workflows to the edge. The new Azure IoT Edge connector now available in HighByte Intelligence Hub version 2.5 makes it easy to deploy the Intelligence Hub through Azure IoT Edge and provides connectivity into the Azure IoT Edge data bus.
Version 2.5 also includes improvements to the Azure IoT hub connector to support communications for Azure IoT Central. Azure IoT Central is a ready-made UX and API surface for connecting and managing devices at scale. The Intelligence Hub can also import data models defined in Azure Digital Twins to structure the data provided to Azure.
Additional improvements were made to seven other connections to improve usability, manageability, and flexibility—including the PI System connector, which now includes support for PI compression as well as the ability to configure the PI source when creating PI points.
Version 2.5 also includes improvements to the Azure IoT hub connector to support communications for Azure IoT Central. Azure IoT Central is a ready-made UX and API surface for connecting and managing devices at scale. The Intelligence Hub can also import data models defined in Azure Digital Twins to structure the data provided to Azure.
Additional improvements were made to seven other connections to improve usability, manageability, and flexibility—including the PI System connector, which now includes support for PI compression as well as the ability to configure the PI source when creating PI points.
Monitoring
The Intelligence Hub version 2.5 improves the ability to monitor the health of data pipelines with several new capabilities. These capabilities build on existing status monitoring to include alarming when devices and sensors stop publishing data and providing access to various performance metrics.
- Alarm conditions and flow to event log. Many IT teams manage and monitor enterprise systems by pulling system logs. Monitoring the last data publish time and alarming if the data is stale or bad quality is critical to maintaining the health of pub/sub data sources. Alarm conditions and any other events can now be directly logged to the Intelligence Hub event log for third-party monitoring solutions to access. Users can automate data flows to know when a source of data stops publishing and notify the appropriate teams.
- Flow performance metrics. Users can monitor the performance of flows either through the UI or by publishing flow execution count and timing to any target system or log
Management
As Intelligence Hub deployments have increased in size and scope, the need for improved environment management with more controls through the software has become a requirement. Intelligence Hub version 2.5 allows administrators to manage authentication and authorization of users through Active Directory and application settings through the user interface. This allows for simpler management, enhanced controls and monitoring, and improved security.
The latest release also includes several other new management capabilities, including the following:
The latest release also includes several other new management capabilities, including the following:
- Application settings. Configure and change application settings through the user interface.
- PKCS #8 and PKCS #12 support. Support secure certificate handling.
- Index cache management. View and reset index cache for SQL inputs and other connections that manage state.
- System variables. The new system variables configuration file allows customers to use the same configuration across sites but control the SiteID or other properties independent of the configuration. This enables each site to publish on its own MQTT topic namespace (as one example).
Advanced Use Cases
The use cases for data passing through Intelligence Hub have increased in complexity and require additional capabilities to deliver them at scale. Many of these use cases require the handling and transformation of sets of data from source systems, complex decision making, or filtering and transformation of the data again on the output. Data sets in some cases may be binary or need special processing by a third-party library to convert into a usable JSON payload.
Users can leverage the Intelligence Hub version 2.5 to complete the following actions:
Users can leverage the Intelligence Hub version 2.5 to complete the following actions:
- Input meta data. Access input and attribute name, type, timestamp, and quality.
- Break up an array. All output connections have the option to break an array payload into individual elements of the array with independent publishes.
- Load third-party JavaScript. Load third-party JavaScript libraries for use in expressions and custom conditions.
- Use Instances as sources. Use an Instance anywhere Inputs can be used as a data source, including condition sources, flow sources, flow triggers, and dynamic input references.
Additional Resources
I hope you’re excited as we are about the new capabilities in version 2.5 that help solve complex, real-world use cases. With the release of version 2.5, enterprise IT organizations can rapidly deploy the Intelligence Hub within their existing IT infrastructure to unlock the value of their industrial data.
To learn more, please check out these additional resources:- Watch this demo.
- Read the release notes for details on all new features and fixes.
- Request a free trial or log in to your existing account to test and deploy the software in your unique environment.
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