IoT & Connectivity Tips

BackgroundGetting a performance benchmark of your running application is an important thing to do when deploying and scaling up an application in production.  This not only helps focus in on performance issues quickly, but also allows for safely planning for scaling up and resource sizing based on real concrete data. I recently created a tool and made a post about capturing and analysing ThingWorx utilisation statistics to do such an analysis, as well as identifying potential performance bottlenecks.Although they are rich and precise, utilisation statistics fall short in a number of areas however - specifically being able to count and time specific service executions, as well as identifying and sorting based on the host executing the service. Tomcat Access Log AnalysisAs ThingWorx is a Tomcat web application, Tomcat logs details of the requests being made to the application server and ThingWorx REST API.  The default settings include the host (IP address), date/time

Alerts are a special type of event.  Alerts allow you to define rules for firing events.  Like events, you must define a subscription to handle a change in state.  All properties in a Thing Shape, Thing Template, or Thing can have one or more alert conditions defined.   You can even define several of the same type of alert.  When an alert condition is met, ThingWorx throws an event. You can subscribe to the event and define the response to the alert using JavaScript.  Events also fire when a property alert is acknowledged and when it goes out of alert condition.   Alert Types Alerts have conditions which describe when the alert is triggered.  The types of conditions available depend upon the property type.  For example, string alerts may be triggered when the string matches pre-set text.  A number alert may be set to trigger when the value of the number is within a range.   EqualTo: Alert is triggered when the defined Value is rea

Not as simple a question as it sounds.  There more options than some might think and choosing the right one can be the difference between a well performing application and one that struggles as it scales up in size.  There are options both internal and external to the Thingworx platform that can be used.  Each has their own use cases and cost considerations. Internal to Thingworx there are three options as the storage provider PostGreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server (Azure SQL for PTC hosted systems) and InFlux DB.  PostGreSQL can be used for storing the Thingworx model structure and data,  and is an open source technology, meaning no additional cost.  SQL Server allows the same model and data storage but has licensing costs associated.  Both perform well up to an estimated 500 Gb of data storage (this is a rough estimate dependant on use case).  For very high volume data InFlux is the choice, it performs well for large data sets. External to

  Hi everyone,   In case you’re looking for more reasons to appreciate the power of Azure, today we’re answering 10 frequently asked questions around how and why to use Azure SQL with ThingWorx.   You likely already know that we support multiple persistence providers, like Azure SQL, InfluxDB, H2, MSSQL and PostgreSQL, for you to store and persist your ThingWorx data. Here’s an up-close-and-personal look into why we recommend Azure SQL.   1. What is Azure SQL?         Azure SQL is a relational database hosted in the Azure cloud and is a fully managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) Database Engine. Azure SQL Database engine is based on the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server. The Azure platform fully manages every Azure SQL Database with a high percentage of data availability and guarantees no data loss. Azure SQL Database comes with built-in high availability, disaster recovery, and upgrade for the database. Refer to Microsoft's Azure SQL D

ThingWorx DevOps with Azure: The Comprehensive DevOps GuideWritten by Tori Firewind, IoT EDC As promised in a previous post,  attached here is a comprehensive guide to DevOps in ThingWorx, including tutorials and instructions for creating a continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD) process for application development.  There are also updated scripts and entities attached, including an entire sample application for importing, exporting, and testing an application in ThingWorx. From Docker and Github to Azure DevOps and Solution Central, this guide has it all. Learn how to perform your role in the DevOps process whether an administrator or a developer, automate your deployments and testing, and create a more efficient process  for publication changes to production.  A complete DevOps process like this really does facilitate faster and easier updates with fewer risks, fewer delays, and a better pathway to success. 

In a recent post, I gave an overview of the types of Building Blocks that are available with the ThingWorx Platform. As a reminder, Building Blocks are a collection of entities packaged together for modular software development. They are intended to be reusable, repeatable, and scalable, and they are the fastest way to either build your own solution or customize a pre-made PTC solution, like ThingWorx Digital Performance Management. There are four types of Building Blocks we will talk about for the development of IIoT applications and solutions on the ThingWorx platform: Connectors, Domain Models, Business Logic, and UI. In this post, we are going to do a deep dive on Connectors, which improve application performance and the transfer of data from disparate devices and systems. What does a Connector look like in ThingWorx?All ThingWorx Building Blocks follow the same naming convention of CompanyName.BuildingBlockName, so any PTC-created Connectors will appear as PTC.Connector. Conn

Hey Community Members –I have exciting news to share! Last week, PTC announced that ThingWorx was recognized as a frontrunner IIOT Platform in four leading analyst research reports on the industrial software market. In alphabetical order, the reports PTC/ThingWorx was named in were:ABI Research’s Smart Manufacturing Platforms Competitive RankingThe Forrester Wave™: Industrial IoT Software Platforms, Q3 2021The Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Industrial IoT PlatformsIDC MarketScape for Industrial IoT Platforms and Applications for ManufacturingNot only is PTC the only company included in all four reports, but it also placed as a leader in all four, which hopefully makes you feel confident in your choice to use ThingWorx. The research criteria the analyst firms use to make selections is unique to each firm, but to us, all of them measure the value ThingWorx can bring to an industrial business. What value does ThingWorx bring to you? Stay connected,Rachel   &nb

Recently I needed to be able to parse and handle XML data natively inside of a ThingWorx script, and this XML file happened to have a SOAP namespace as well. I learned a few things along the way that I couldn’t find a lot of documentation on, so am sharing here.   Lessons Learned The biggest lesson I learned is that ThingWorx uses “E4X” XML handling. This is a language that Mozilla created as a way for JavaScript to handle XML (the full name is “ECMAscript for XML”). While Mozilla deprecated the language in 2014, Rhino, the JavaScript engine that ThingWorx uses on the server, still supports it, so ThingWorx does too. Here’s a tutorial on E4X - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Web/E4X_tutorial The built-in linter in ThingWorx will complain about E4X syntax, but it still works. I learned how to get to the data I wanted and loop through to create an InfoTable. Hopefully this is what you want to do as well.   Selecting an Element and Iterating My data came insi

Original Post Date:      June 6, 2016   Description: This is a video tutorial on creating an InfoTable through a service, creating and adding a Data Shape adding rows to the Infotable through a service, adding rows to an InfoTable property and querying the InfoTable.    

The long-awaited manufacturing solution,  ThingWorx Digital Performance Management (DPM), has arrived! Announced at PTC’s  Manufacturing Live event, DPM provides key use cases around overall equipment effectiveness and real-time performance monitoring, while delivering insights with analytics and automated bottleneck identification tools. DPM gives customers clear insight into where and what to fix to drive efficiencies. Composed of modular building blocks with a foundation on the ThingWorx platform, DPM is easily configurable and customizable for closed-loop problem solving that drives productivity. Let’s take a deeper look into what DPM is and how you can implement it to ensure your investment in the ThingWorx platform and digital transformation delivers business impact. Monitor in real-time with Production DashboardThe Production Dashboard allows for automated or manual data entry of reason codes with a simple interface for limited disruption. Rather than providi

Back in 2018 an interesting capability was added to ThingWorx Foundation allowing you to enable statistical calculation of service and subscription execution. We typically advise customers to approach this with caution for production systems as the additional overhead can be more than you want to add to the work the platform needs to handle.  This said, these statistics is used consciously can be extremely helpful during development, testing, and troubleshooting to help ascertain which entities are executing what services and where potential system bottlenecks or areas deserving performance optimization may lie. Although I've used the Utilization Subsystem services for statistics for some time now, I've always found that the Composer table view is not sufficient for a deeper multi-dimensional analysis.  Today I took a first step in remedying this by getting these metrics into Excel and I wanted to share it with the community as it can be quite helpful in giving deve

Is your team operating an effective DevOps pipeline? DevOps is an important part of a mature, enterprise ready application, but the process isn’t simple.   This expert session will focus on how a full DevOps pipeline looks like and how PTC can help to build a seamless pipeline. Join us for our upcoming Expert Session to learn how to create a Docker image, integrate Azure with Docker and Git, and set up a seamless DevOps pipeline.   When? Thursday, September 30th 2021 | 11 AM EST Host: Tori FIrewind, Senior Engineer in PTC IOT Enterprise Deployment Center Registration link: https://www.ptc.com/en/resources/iiot/webcast/devops-pipeline-thingworx 

Super simple widget that embeds the HTML5 audio tag, allowing MP3 files to be played and/or triggers by another mashup event.

Previously Installing & Connecting C SDK to Federated ThingWorx with VNC Tunneling to the Edge device Installing and configuring Web Socket Tunnel Extension on ThingWorx Platform Overview     Using the C SDK Edge client configuration we did earlier, we'll now create above illustrated setup. In this C SDK Client we'll push the data to ThingWorx Publisher with servername : TW802Neo to ThingWorx Subscriber servername : TW81. Notice that the SteamSensor2 on the pulisher server is the one binding to the C SDK client and the FederatedSteamThing on subscriber is only getting data from the SteamSensor2. Let's crack on!   Content   Configure ThingWorx to publish Configure ThingWorx to subscribe Publish entities from Publisher to the Subscriber Create Mashup to view data published to the subscriber Pre-requisiteMinimum requirement is to have two ThingWorx servers running. Note that both ThingWorx systems can be publisher & subscriber at the same time. &

Thundering Herd Scenarios in ThingWorx Written by Jim Klink, Edited by Tori Firewind   Introduction The thundering herd topic is quite vast, but it can be broken down into two main categories: the “data flood” and the “reconnect storm”. One category involves what happens to the business login (the “data flood” scenario) and affects both Factory and Connected Products use cases. The other category involves bringing many, many devices back online in a short time (the “reconnect storm” scenario), which largely influences Connected Products scenarios.   Citation: https://gfp.sd.gov/buffalo-roundup/ Think of Connected Products as a thundering stampede of many small buffalo, which then makes a Factory thundering herd scenario a stampede of a couple massive brontosaurus, much fewer in number, but still with lots of persisted data to send back in. This article focuses in on how to manage the “reconnect storm” scenario, by delaying the return of individual buffalo to reduce the inten

  Hello, IIoT Developers!   Today, I’m going to provide you an overview of a new SDK we’re offering for developers to build custom web content. It’s called our Visual SDK. We released 9.0 in June, so it’s time to start getting excited! In case you missed it, check out these other 9.0 posts on active-active clustering, Composer and Mashup Builder, and the 9.0 release overall.   In 8.4, we introduced a new visualization architecture and set of web components based on Polymer. We’ve continually updated and added new widgets and features with this architecture each release, including new Chart Components in 9.0. This SDK was previously available mostly as a style guidance, informing designers and developers what elements and behaviors were available in the new PTC web component-based widgets. You could use this SDK to style in CSS custom elements of the web components in a mashup-based application. You weren’t, in 8.4, really able to use this SDK yet to actually create your

ThingWorx Docker Overview and Pitfalls to Avoid    by Tori Firewind of the IoT EDC Containers are isolated and can run side-by-side on the same machine, but they share the host OS, making them more efficient in terms of memory usage and scalability.   Docker is a great tool for deploying ThingWorx instances because everything is pre-packaged within the Docker image and can be stored in a repository ready for deployment at any time with little configuration required.  By using a different container for every component of an application, conflicting dependencies can be avoided. Containers also facilitate the dev ops process, providing consistent application deployments which can be set up, taken down, and tested automatically using scripts.   Using containers is advantageous for many reasons: simplified configuration, easier dev ops management, continuous integration and deployment, cost savings, decreased delivery time for new application versions, and many ver

JMeter for ThingWorx Overview Apache JMeter is an open-source tool designed for load testing and measuring the performance of a web application. JMeter has a wide range of features to facilitate this testing, including support for a variety of server and protocol types, a full-featured testing IDE with the ability to record the test steps from both a browser or a native application, and built-in debugging tools. Information about JMeter can be found on Apache’s website.   Working with JMeter is not always intuitive, but it also isn’t that much harder than regular software development. Take some time to explore the official Apache JMeter Documentation and figure out where things go and how to mechanically make use of the JMeter IDE. Then step through this tutorial to create a basic test that logins to ThingWorx, accesses a mashup, and clicks on a few widgets. This is the first in a series to come, courtesy of IoT EDC Engineer Tim Atwood ( @atwood ) and the whole EDC team. &nb

  You might have seen the Performance Advisor for some of your other favorite PTC Products like Creo, Windchill or Integrity.  Good news....it's now also available for ThingWorx!   In case you're not familiar with the Performance Advisor, it's new functionality allowing you to work closer with the PTC / ThingWorx team for improving your usage with ThingWorx and improving ThingWorx itself in the areas that matter most to you.      ThingWorx Performance Advisor   delivers information dashboards driven by data on the features, usage and performance of your ThingWorx systems unlocks information that can reduce wasted development and improve design cycles allows comprehensive visibility into software versions in use to manage software upgrade plans simplifies compliance and revenue allocation by monitoring usage enables quick access to system and usage statistics across your organization uses personalized dashboards to viewing, reporting and tr

With ThingWorx, we can already use univariate anomaly alerts (on a single sensor value). However, in many situations, the readings from an individual sensor may not tell you much about the overall issue and a multivariate anomaly detector can be more useful. This post is intended to provide an overview of the Azure Anomaly Detector and how it can be integrated with ThingWorx. The attachment contains: A document with detailed instructions about the setup; A .csv file with the multivariate timeseries dataset; A .twx file with some entities that need to be imported in ThingWorx as well as the CSVParser extension that needs to be installed; A .zip file that will need to uploaded in an Azure Blob Container at some point in the setup

Those who have been working with ThingWorx for many years will have noticed the work done around ingress stress testing and performance optimization.  Adding InfluxDB as a time-series data persistence provider really helped level up these capabilities while simultaneously decreasing the overall resources required by the infrastructure.  However with this ease comes a hidden challenge: query and data processing performance to work it into something useful.   Often It's Too Much Data In general most customers that I work with want to collect far too much data -- without knowing what it will be used for, or what processing will be required in order to make it usable and useful.  This is a trap in general with how many people envision IoT projects, being told by infrastructure providers that cloud storage and compute resources are abundant and cheap and that they should get as much data as possible.  This buildup of data means that more effort needs to be spent wor

Initial Objective statementsThis post is about getting D3 connected as an extension to Thingworx.There are a number of existing extensions using D3 but I wanted to explore a simple use case to make it easier to get into and bring out 2 additional pointsUsing an infotable as data inputResizeThe output looks like the image belowand the data was generated by a Timer based random value generator that set the values on a Thing every minute.The data into the Widget is from a core service QueryHistory (a wrapped service that uses QueryProperyHistory)In this example I will use temp as the variable in focusIf you have never created an extension take a look at Widget Extensions Introduction which provides a start to understanding the steps defined below, which are the core points to keep it relatively short.The extension will be called d3timeseries and will use the standard design patternCreate a folder called d3timeseries and create a subfolder ui and a add a metadata.xml file to the d3timeseri

Hi everyone,   Maybe you got my email, I just wanted to post this also here.   I built a CSS generator for a few widgets, 8 at the moment. This is on a cloud instance accessible by anyone.   Advantages:      - don't have to style buttons and apply style definitions over and over again      - greater flexibility in styling the widget      - you don't have to write any CSS code   The way this works: you use the configurator to style the widget as you want. Use also a class to define what that widget is, or how it's styled. For example "primary-btn", "secondary-btn", etc. Copy the generated CSS code into the CustomCSS tab in ThingWorx and on the widget, put the CustomClass specified in the configurator.   As a best practice, I'd recommend placing all your CSS code into the Master mashup. And then all your mashups that use that master will also get the CustomCSS. So the only thing you have to do to your widgets in the ma

5 Common Mistakes to Developing Scalable IoT Applications by Tori Firewind and the IoT EDC Team Introduction To build scalable applications, it’s necessary to identify common mistakes and avoid them at the early stages of development. In an expert session this past month, the PTC Enterprise Deployment Team elaborated on why scalability is important and how to avoid the common development pitfalls in IoT. That video presentation has been adapted here for visual consumption of the content as well.   What is Scalability and Why Does it Matter Enterprise ready applications can scale and easily be maintained, which is important even from day 1 because scalability concerns are the largest cause for delays to Go Lives.  Applications balance many competing requirements, and performance testing is crucial to ensure an application is ready for Go Live. However, don't just test how many remote assets can connect at once, but also any metrics that are expected to increase in time, lik

  ThingWorx 9.2 is here! Deploy an entire solution and all its dependencies in one click with Solution Central’s one-click deploy, garner deeper analytic insight with our new waterfall charts, and manage and authenticate users more seamlessly with an Azure Active Directory integration. Discover these features and more in my 9.2 preview post here!   Review our release notes here and be sure to upgrade to 9.2!   Stay connected, Kaya