IoT & Connectivity Tips

IntroductionThe Edge MicroServer (EMS) and Lua Script Resource (LSR) are Edge software that can be used to connect remote devices to the ThingWorx platform. Using a Gateway is beneficial because, this will allow you to run one instance of the EMS on a server and then many instances of the LSR on different devices all over the world. All communication to the platform will be handled by this one EMS Gateway server. The EMS Gateway can be set up in two different types of scenarios: Self-Identifying Remote Things and Explicitly defined Remote Things​.The scenario I'm going to discuss below will involve explicitly defined Remote Things, a ThingWorx server, an EMS, and a LSR. We will need at least 1 server to run the ThingWorx platform and EMS, but these can always be on separate servers as well. We will also need some other machine or device that will run the LSR.Visit the support downloads page to find the latest EMS releases. The LSR is contained within the EMS download.You can also navig

Help Center link on how to control file transfers from the edge client using the EdgeControlled ThingShape.   The EdgeControlled ThingShape is a default entity included with ThingWorx that allows you to manage the amount of egress being sent from the platform to the Edge.   At the time of writing this post, the available 'When Disconnected' settings for a remotely bound property in ThingWorx are 'Fold' and 'Ignore'. Setting a property to 'Fold' while using this EdgeControlled ThingShape is necessary whether the device is connected all the time or only for brief updates.   To use this ThingShape in a real world scenario you might code your edge client to invoke the DequeueEgress REST API function available through this ThingShape. The parameter you pass in is then the number of messages you would like the client to receive. The result of this function is how many messages the platform then actually sent.   A quick setup: 1. Create a RemoteThing entity in ThingWorx 2.

Underneath, video is about ThingWorx Analytics and walks through following functions: Upload a Dataset. Create a Training Model. Create a Scoring Job.

Previously Installing & Connecting C SDK to Federated ThingWorx with VNC Tunneling to the Edge device   Pre-requisite Download and install Web Sockets Tunnels Widget and Library Extension from PTC Marketplace   Configuring Tunnel Subsystem   1. Logon to ThingWorx Composer > System > Tunnel Subsystem > Configuration 2. Public host name used for tunnels & Public port used for tunnels parameters require publically address FQDN or IP of the instance running ThingWorx server and the port on which its listening. 3. From the screenshot above the TW802Neo is the name of the server and 443 is the port configured for ThingWorx to listen on 4. Navigate back to the RemoteThing we created above to connect our C SDK client to on the ThingWorx platform and ensure that the Enable Tunnelling is turned on   5. Click on Configuration and click Add My Tunnel button to configure where should the tunnel be opened to   6. In the above example Host and Port para

Content Configuring ThingWorx C SDK Configuring C SDK client example for Tunneling Accepting Self Signed certificate Installing and configuring VNC Extension on ThingWorx Platform Configuring Tunnel Subsystem Configuring Remote Access & WebSocket tunnel widgets in a Mashup Setting up Federated ThingWorx   NOTE : For sake of brevity I'll divide this blog in sub blogs and will link them where ever needed.   Configuring ThingWorx C SDK   Pre-requisite Ensure that following two utilities are installed Cmake Make For linux platform both will likely be pre-installed Have ThingWorx configured with self-signed certificate (optional), refer to this article ThingWorx setup SSL / HTTPS on Tomcat with Self-Signed Certificate Create a Thing to which you want to bind to from the csdk example, e.g. create SteamSensor2 with ThingTemplate RemoteThingWithTunnels (below screenshot shows ThingTemplate RemoteThingWithTunnelsAndFileTransfer - this is not must for this blog

Disclaimer: This post does of course not express any political views.   Pie Chart Coloring   In ThingWorx Pie Charts use a default color schema based on the DefaultChartStyle Definitions. These schemas are using fixed numbering and coloring systems, e.g. 1 is blue, 2 is green, 3 is red and so on. All Pie Charts will be rendered with these colors in the same order, no matter which data the chart is using. Visualization of data with the default colors might not necessarily help in creating an easy to read chart.   Just take a look at the following example with the default color schema. Let's just take political parties - as they are usually associated with a distinct color - to illustrate how the default color schema will fail depending on the data displayed.         In the first example, just by sheer coincidence the colors are perfectly matching the parties. When introducing a new party to the pool suddenly the blues are rendered green and the yellow

Precision and Recall are the evaluation matrices that are used to evaluate the machine learning algorithm used. This post needs some prior understanding of the confusion matrix and would recommend you to go through it here.   Example of Animal Image Recognition Consider the below Confusion Matrix for the input of the animal images and algorithm trying to identify the animal correctly: ANIMALS Cat Dog Leopard Tiger Jaguar Puma Cat 62 2 0 0 1 0 Dog 1 50 1 0 4 0 Leopard 0 2 98 4 0 0 Tiger 0 0 10 78 2 0 Jaguar 0 1 8 0 46 0 Puma 2 0 0 1 1 42   Explaining Few Random Grids: [Cat, Cat]: The grid is having the value 62. It means the image of a cat was identified as a cat for 62 times. [Cat, Dog]: The grid is having the value 2. It means the image of a cat was identified as dog twice. [Leopard, Tiger]: The grid is having the value 4. It means the image of Leopard was ide

In this blog post I'm covering the pratical aspects of setting up a Chain of Trust and configure ThingWorx to use it.There are already some examples available on how to do this via command line using a self-signed certificate, e.g. https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS193947In this example I'll be using the KeyStore Explorer, a graphical tool for managing keystores.http://keystore-explorer.org/To learn more about the theory behind trust and encryption, see also Trust & Encryption - TheoryThe Chain of TrustCreating a Root CAOpen the KeyStore Explorer and create a new jks KeyStore File > New > JKSVia Tools > Generate Key Pair create a new key-pair.Use the RSA algorithm with a key size of 4096. This size is more than sufficient.Set a validity period of e.g. 302 days.It's important that all subsequent certificates have a lower validity period than the original signer.Leave the other defaults and fill out the Name (addressbook icon).Only the Common Nam

This is a follow-up post on my initial document about Edge Microserver (EMS) and Lua Script Resource (LSR) security. While the first part deals with fundamentals on secure configurations, this second part will give some more practical tips and tricks on how to implement these security measurements.   For more information it's also recommended to read through the Setting Up Secure Communications for WS EMS and LSR chapter in the ThingWorx Help Center. See also Trust & Encryption Theory and Hands On for more information and examples - especially around the concept of the Chain of Trust, which will be an important factor for this post as well.   In this post I will only reference the High Security options for both, the EMS and the LSR. Note that all commands and directories are Linux based - Windows equivalents might slightly differ.   Note - some of the configuration options are color coded for easy recognition: LSR resources / EMS resources   Password Encryption

OverviewTime-series predictive models generated by ThingWorx Analytics Server in Analytics Manager will have additional columns in their dataShape generated by ThingPredictor. These columns are known as “transformation fields” and are used for internal processing but are not necessary for inclusion in the DataShape.  So there is no need to worry about mapping all these additional fields since it will be handled internally by ThingPredictor.  There is one addition step that the user must take which is detailed below.Step to Import:Edit the DataShape generated by ThingPredictor to match the format of the data that was provided during the model training process. In other words, remove all the transformation fields from the DataShape.

This is going to cover one way of configuring an SSL passthrough using HAProxy.  This guide is intended to be a reference document, and administrators looking to configure an SSL passthrough should make sure the end solution meets both their company's business and security needs.   Why use SSL Passthrough instead of SSL Termination? The main reason for ThingWorx would be if a company requires encrypted communication internally, as well as externally.  With SSL Termination, the request between the load balancer and the client is encrypted.  But the load balancer takes on the role to decrypt and passes that back to the server.  With SSL Passthrough, the request goes through the load balancer as is, and the decryption happens on the ThingWorx Application server.   What you will need to continue with this guide:   HAProxy installed A working ThingWorx application server (Guide to getting one setup can be found here) Tomcat configured for ssl NOTE : Alwa

ThingWorx 8.3 covers the following areas of the product portfolio:  ThingWorx Analytics, ThingWorx Utilities, and ThingWorx Foundation which includes Connection Server and Edge capabilities.   Highlights of the release include:   ThingWorx Foundation Next Generation Composer: Now default admin and developer interface Full Feature parity with legacy Composer New capability for User and Group administration, Authorization and permissions, Export, Monitoring and Logging. More in Helpcenter Localization support for German and French Mashup Builder: JQuery 3 upgrade Grid Advanced Extension now supports Cell Editing and Footers Platform: Active Directory (AD) Integration enhancements for larger AD forests and user extension field mapping Upgrade in-place enhancements for Java SDK developers Developer Enablement Capture the usage statics such as time taken to execute a ThingWorx service, # of times a service runs in ThingWorx using Service Utilization Statistics fun

There are Four Types of Analytics:                        Descriptive: What Happened?Descriptive analytics is a preliminary stage of data processing that creates a summary of historical data to yield useful information and possibly prepare the data for further analysis. Analytics, which use data aggregation and data mining to provide insight into the past and answer: “What has happened?Descriptive analysis or statistics does exactly what the name implies they “Describe”, or summarize raw data and make it something that is interpret-able by humans. They are analytics that describe the past. The past refers to any point of time that an event has occurred, whether it is one minute ago, or one year ago. Descriptive analytics are useful because they allow us to learn from past behaviors, and understand how they might influence future outcomes.The vast majority of the statistics

Timers and Schedulers can also be created and configured programmatically via custom services. The following service, which can be created on any Thing, will create a new Timer using the following Inputs:         // create new Thing var params = { name: ThingName /* STRING */, description: undefined /* STRING */, thingTemplateName: "Timer" /* THINGTEMPLATENAME */, tags: undefined /* TAGS */ }; Resources["EntityServices"].CreateThing(params); // read initial configuration // result: INFOTABLE var configtable = Things[ThingName].GetConfigurationTable({tableName: "Settings"}); // update configuration with service parameters configtable.updateRate = updateRate configtable.runAsUser = user // set new configuration table var params = { configurationTable: configtable /* INFOTABLE */, persistent: true /* BOOLEAN */, tableName: "Settings" /* STRING */ }; Things[ThingName].SetConfigurationTable(params);   This code is an example which could also be u

This video will walk you through the first steps of how to set-up Analytics Manager for Real-Time Scoring. More specifically this video demonstrate how to share your predictive model from Analytics Builder into Analytics Manger -and test the shared model.   Updated Link for access to this video::  ThingWorx Analytics Manager: Publish & Test a Predictive Model

In this IoT-AR Tech Tip, we will cover what the microservices do, and their functions overall in the ThingWorx Analytics Server Application.   With the new architecture changes introduced with ThingWorx Analytics 8.1, many users have asked for a more descriptive explanation of the purpose of the microservices that make up the Analytics Server application. In 8.3, Descriptive Microservice has been introduced, and changings in how Predictive Scoring were incorporated. ThingPredictor has been deprecated and its primary functions have been incorporated into ThingWorx Analytics Server’s Prediction microservice.   Many of these microservices can be installed as separate distinct utilities, though there some that are required for base functionality of Analytics Server. This allows custom installation by the end-user to tailor the TWA deployment to their needs.   ThingWorx Analytics Server Microservices   Analytics Microservice – Analytics Server Edge Agent acts as an integ

Overview This document is targeted towards covering basic PostgreSQL monitoring and health check related system objects like tables, views, etc. This allows simple monitoring of PostgreSQL database via some custom services, which I'll attach at the end of this document, from the ThingWorx Composer itself. I'll also try to cover short detail on some of the services that are included with the Thing: PostgreSQLHealthCheck which implements Database ThingTemplate   Pre-requisite The document assumes that the user already has ThingWorx running with PostgreSQL as a Persistence Provider.   How to install Usage for this is fairly straight forward, import the Entities.twx and it will create required Thing which implements Database ThingTemplate and some DataShapes. Each Service under the Thing: PostgreSQLHealthCheck has its own DataShape. Feel free edit these services / DataShapes if you are looking to use output of these services  as part of your mashup(s).   M

Large files could cause slow response times. In some cases large queries might cause extensively large response files, e.g. calling a ThingWorx service that returns an extensively large result set as JSON file.   Those massive files have to be transferred over the network and require additional bandwidth - for each and every call. The more bandwidth is used, the more time is taken on the network, the more the impact on performance could be. Imagine transferring tens or hundreds of MB for service calls for each and every call - over and over again.   To reduce the bandwidth compression can be activated. Instead of transferring MBs per service call, the server only has to transfer a couple of KB per call (best case scenario). This needs to be configured on Tomcat level. There is some information availabe in the offical Tomcat documation at https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.5-doc/config/http.htmlSearch for the "compression" attribute.   Gzip compression   Usually Tomc

This video walks through the dataset requirements when working with time series in ThingWorx Analytics Server.  Starting release 52.2 - ending release 8.2.   Also view: - Written version of those steps mentioned in the video - Help Center  

The AddStreamEntries​ snippet does not offer too much information, except that it needs an InfoTable as input. It is however based on the InfoTable for the AddStreamEntity service.     To use the AddStreamEntries table, an InfoTable based on sourceType, values, location, source, timestamp​ and ​tags​ must be used.   In this example, I started with a new Thing based on a ​Stream​ template and the following DataShape:     This DataShape must be converted into an InfoTable with is used as the ​values​ parameter. It's important that the ​timestamp​ parameter has distinct values! Otherwise values matching the same timestamp will be overwritten!   We don't really need the sourceType​ as ThingWorx will automatically determine the type by knowing the source and which kind of Entity Type it is.   I created a new ​MyStreamThing​ with a new service, filling the InfoTable and the Stream. The result is the following code which will add 5 rows to the Stream: &nbs

I always find it difficult to remember which version of software is supported with which version of ThingWorx, so I created a table for my reference. I hope this is also helpful to other people.   Oracle JDK Tomcat Database Options Memo PostgreSQL Neo4J H2 Microsoft SQLServer SAP HANA DetaStax Enterprise Edition ThingWorx 6.5 1.8.0(64-bit) 8.0.23(64-bit) 9.4.4 embedded N/A N/A N/A N/A IE 10 ThingWorx 6.6 1.8.0(64-bit) 8.0.23(64-bit) 9.4.4 embedded N/A N/A N/A N/A ThingWorx 7.0 1.8.0(64-bit) 8.0.23(64-bit) 9.4.? embedded N/A N/A N/A N/A ThingWorx 7.1 1.8.0_92-b14(64-bit) 8.0.33(64-bit) 9.4.5 embedded N/A N/A N/A 4.6.3 ThingWorx 7.2 1.8.0_92-b14(64-bit) 8.0.33(64-bit) 9.4.5 embedded embedded N/A N/A 4.6.3 IE 11 and later ThingWorx 7.3 1.8.0_92-b14(64-bit) 8.0.38(64-bit) 9.4.5 embedded embedded N/A SPS 11, 12 4.6.3, 5 ThingWorx 7.4 1.8.0_92-b14(64-bit) 8.0.38(64-bit) 9.4.5 embedded embedded 2014 and later SPS 11, 12 4.6.3, 5 ThingWorx 8.0 1.8.0_92-b14

This video go through the steps required to use the Creo Insight extension: - Download and install the required extension - Set required config.pro options - Create provider in Analytics Manager - Publish sensor from Creo - Create analysis Event in Analysis Manager - Retrieve sensor values from ThingWorx in Creo     See also: - https://www.ptc.com/en/support/article?n=CS277514  for a  written version of those steps. - Creo Help Center  

Thing Subscription This post is intended for novice ThingWorx users who wants to understand what the definition of Thing Subscription is and the overall purpose of using Thing Subscriptions.   Definition of a Thing Subscription? A Thing subscription is a script(JavaScript) that is called each time an event occurs. Events are property states which are of end users interest (e.g. temperature) and therefore indicators to kick off some functionality in a Thing subscription when any action needed. Events can e.g. be triggered by an Alert that detects a change or an anomaly in property values. The Thing subscription is explicitly linked to an event and when the event is fired the data is being passed to the subscriber.    Why Use a Thing Subscription? Imagine your machine is running 24 hours 7 days a week with supervised human interaction. If a pump temperature exceeds accepted value it needs to be regulated by the manufacturing department. But no one in the department knows w

Sometimes you need the values from different ThingTemplate members in ONE grid. Therefore it would be great, if you can join 2 "GetImplementedThingsWithData" results into a common one. Here a script that works generally as long as you don't mess with datatypes on same column names.I'm very interested, if someone can find a much easier solution. The Union function was the only one I found suited for the task, but this needs preparation of the infotables upfront.Input:Table1 :InfotableTable2: InfotableOutput: InfotableHere the "Snippet":// Define params for an Infotable to hold column namesvar params = {  infoTableName: "field" /* STRING */};// Define column 1var newField = new Object();newField.name = "field";newField.baseType = 'STRING';// Two 1 columns Infotables to store the field definition;var field1 = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].CreateInfoTable(params);field1.AddField(newField);var field2 = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].CreateInfoTable(params);field2.AddField(newField);

    Go beyond functional application development and learn how you can dress up your UI to enhance the user experience. In this webinar, we'll show you how to implement common design elements throughout your UI including custom logos, color schemes, and styles.   In this video, UI expert Tsveta Saul will demonstrate valuable tips and tricks for making a sophisticated IoT application with ThingWorx, including: Masters and Menus - enhance your app framework with personalized menu titles, backgrounds, and custom headers Layout and Labels - create consistency in your application by combining commonly used widgets State and Style Definitions - define widget styles to illustrate your brand Images - integrate visuals to describe thousands of words' worth of design and development specifications Watch the recording above, and download this sample Mashup containing all the data and entities shared in the video.   Q&A   We didn’t have time to get to all o