cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

ThingWorx Navigate is now Windchill Navigate Learn More

IoT & Connectivity Tips

Sort by:
Hello!   “ThingWorx on Air” Episode 9 is now available! Grab your headphones and listen to Neal, an Azure subject matter expert, and Janie, a PM focused on Azure functionality, introduce a new integration we’re working on between Kepware, Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub and ThingWorx.   Discover how you’ll be able to leverage and model OPC UA data directly in the Thing Model, how you’ll be able to connect just about any OPC UA device through the Azure stack and to the Cloud, and so much more. We can’t wait to continue to extend ThingWorx functionality to support industry standards like the OPC UA protocols.   Are you excited? Wish you could get your hands on this functionality early? You can! Reach out to Janie at jpascoe@ptc.com to learn how you can become involved in an exclusive OPC UA & ThingWorx preview program.   Enjoy the episode and let me know what you think below!   Stay connected, Kaya
View full tip
In ThingWorx Analytics, you have the possibility to use an external model for scoring. In this written tutorial, I would like to provide an overview of how you can use a model developed in Python, using the scikit-learn library in ThingWorx Analytics. The provided attachment contains an archive with the following files: iris_data.csv: A dataset for pattern recognition that has a categorical goal. You can click here to read more about this dataset TestRFToPmml.ipynb: A Jupyter notebook file with the source code for the Python model as well as the steps to export it to PMML RF_Iris.pmml: The PMML file with the model that you can directly upload in Analytics without going through the steps of training the model in Python The tutorial assumes you already have some knowledge of ThingWorx and ThingWorx Analytics. Also, if you plan to run the Python code and train the model yourself, you need to have Jupyter notebook installed (I used the one from the Anaconda distribution). For demonstration purposes, I have created a very simple random forest model in Python. To convert the model to PMML, I have used the sklearn2pmml library. Because ThingWorx Analytics supports PMML format 4.3, you need to install sklearn2pmml version 0.56.2 (the highest version that supports PMML 4.3). To read more about this library, please click here Furthermore, to use your model with the older version of the sklearn2pmml, I have installed scikit-learn version 0.23.2.  You will find the commands to install the two libraries in the first two cells of the notebook.   Code Walkthrough The first step is to import the required libraries (please note that pandas library is also required to transform the .csv to a Dataframe object):   import pandas from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier from sklearn2pmml import sklearn2pmml from sklearn.model_selection import GridSearchCV from sklearn2pmml.pipeline import PMMLPipeline   After importing the required libraries, we convert the iris_data.csv to a pandas dataframe and then create the features (X) as well as the goal (Y) vectors:   iris_df = pandas.read_csv("iris_data.csv") iris_X = iris_df[iris_df.columns.difference(["class"])] iris_y = iris_df["class"]   To best tune the random forest, we will use the GridSearchCSV and cross-validation. We want to test what parameters have the best validation metrics and for this, we will use a utility function that will print the results:   def print_results(results): print('BEST PARAMS: {}\n'.format(results.best_params_)) means = results.cv_results_['mean_test_score'] stds = results.cv_results_['std_test_score'] for mean, std, params in zip(means, stds, results.cv_results_['params']): print('{} (+/-{}) for {}'.format(round(mean, 3), round(std * 2, 3), params))   We create the random forest model and train it with different numbers of estimators and maximum depth. We will then call the previous function to compare the results for the different parameters:   rf = RandomForestClassifier() parameters = { 'n_estimators': [5, 50, 250], 'max_depth': [2, 4, 8, 16, 32, None] } cv = GridSearchCV(rf, parameters, cv=5) cv.fit(iris_X, iris_y) print_results(cv)   To convert the model to a PMML file, we need to create a PMMLPipeline object, in which we pass the RandomForestClassifier with the tuning parameters we identified in the previous step (please note that in your case, the parameters can be different than in my example). You can check the sklearn2pmml  documentation  to see other examples for creating this PMMLPipeline object :   pipeline = PMMLPipeline([ ("classifier", RandomForestClassifier(max_depth=4,n_estimators=5)) ]) pipeline.fit(iris_X, iris_y)   Then we perform the export:   sklearn2pmml(pipeline, "RF_Iris.pmml", with_repr = True)   The model has now been exported as a PMML file in the same folder as the Jupyter Notebook file and we can upload it to ThingWorx Analytics.   Uploading and Exploring the PMML in Analytics To upload and use the model for scoring, there are two steps that you need to do: First, the PMML file needs to be uploaded to a ThingWorx File Repository Then, go to your Analytics Results thing (the name should be YourAnalyticsGateway_ResultsThing) and execute the service UploadModelFromRepository. Here you will need to specify the repository name and path for your PMML file, as well as a name for your model (and optionally a description)   If everything goes well, the result of the service will be an id. You can save this id to a separate file because you will use it later on. You can verify the status of this model and if it’s ready to use by executing the service GetDetails:   Assuming you want to use the PMML for scoring, but you were not the one to develop the model, maybe you don’t know what the expected inputs and the output of the model are. There are two services that can help you with this: QueryInputFields – to verify the fields expected as input parameters for a scoring job   QueryOutputFields – to verify the expected output of the model The resultType input parameter can be either MODELS or CLUSTERS, depending on the type of model,    Using the PMML for Scoring With all this information at hand, we are now ready to use this PMML for real-time scoring. In a Thing of your choice, define a service to test out the scoring for the PMML we have just uploaded. Create a new service with an infotable as the output (don’t add a datashape). The input data for scoring will be hardcoded in the service, but you can also add it as service input parameters and pass them via a Mashup or from another source. The script will be as follows:   // Values: INFOTABLE dataShape: "" let datasetRef = DataShapes["AnalyticsDatasetRef"].CreateValues(); // Values: INFOTABLE dataShape: "" let data = DataShapes["IrisData"].CreateValues(); data.AddRow({ sepal_length: 2.7, sepal_width: 3.1, petal_length: 2.1, petal_width: 0.4 }); datasetRef.AddRow({ data: data}); // predictiveScores: INFOTABLE dataShape: "" let result = Things["AnalyticsServer_PredictionThing"].RealtimeScore({ modelUri: "results:/models/" + "97471e07-137a-41bb-9f29-f43f107bf9ca", //replace with your own id datasetRef: datasetRef /* INFOTABLE */, });   Once you execute the service, the output should look like this (as we would have expected, according to the output fields in the PMML model):   As you have seen, it is easy to use a model built in Python in ThingWorx Analytics. Please note that you may use it only for scoring, and the model will not appear in Analytics Builder since you have created it on a different platform. If you have any questions about this brief written tutorial, let me know.
View full tip
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 developers and architects another view into their ThingWorx applications and to take and compare benchmarks to ensure that the operational and scaling is happening as was expected when the application was put into production.   Utilization Subsystem Statistics You can enable and configure statistics calculation from the Subsystem Configuration tab.  The help documentation does a good job of explaining this so I won't mention it here.  Base guidance is not to use Persisted statistics, nor percentile calculation as both have significant performance impacts.  Aggregate statistics are less resource intensive as there are less counters so this would be more appropriate for a production environment.  Specific entity statistics require greater resources and this will scale up as well with the number of provisioned entities that you have (ie: 1,000 machines versus 10,000 machines) whereas aggregate statistics will remain more constant as you scale up your deployment and its load.   Utilization Subsystem Services In the subsystem Services tab, you can select "UtilizationSubsystem" from the filter drop down and you will see all of the relevant services to retrieve and reset the statistics.     Here I'm using the GetEntityStatistics service to get entity statistics for Services and Subscriptions.     Giving us something like this.      Using Postman to Save the Results to File I have used Postman to do the same REST API call and to format the results as HTML and to save these results to file so that they can be imported into Excel.   You need to call '/Thingworx/Subsystems/UtilizationSubsystem/Services/GetEntityStatistics' as a POST request with the Content-Type and Accept headers set to 'application/xml'.  Of course you also need to add an appropriately permissioned and secured AppKey to the headers in order to authenticate and get service execution authorization.     You'll note the Export Results > Save to a file menu over on the right to get your results saved.   Importing the HTML Results into Excel As simple as I would like to hope that getting a standard web formatted file into Excel should be, it didn't turn out to be as easy as I would have hoped and so I have to switch over to Windows to take advantage of Power Query.   From the Data ribbon, select Get Data > From File > From XML.  Then find and select the HTML file saved in the previous step.     Once it has loaded the file and done some preparation, you'll need to select the GetEntityStatistics table in the results on the left.  This should display all of the statistics in a preview table on the right.     Once the query completed, you should have a table showing your statistical data ready for... well... slicing and dicing.     The good news is that I did the hard part for you, so you can just download the attached spreadsheet and update the dataset with your fresh data to have everything parsed out into separate columns for you.     Now you can use the column filters to search for entity or service patterns or to select specific entities or attributes that you want to analyze.  You'll need to later clear the column filters to get your whole dataset back.     Updating the Spreadsheet with Fresh Data In order to make this data and its analysis more relevant, I went back and reset all of the statistics and took a new sample which was exactly one hour long.  This way I would get correct recent min/max execution time values as well as having a better understanding of just how many executions / triggers are happening in a one hour period for my benchmark.   Once I got the new HTML file save, I went into Excel's Data ribbon, selected a cell in the data table area, and clicked "Queries & Connections" which brought up the pane on the right which shows my original query.     Hovering over this query, I'm prompted with some stuff and I chose "Edit".     Then I clicked on the tiny little gear to the right of "Source" over on the pane on the right side.     Finally I was able to select the new file and Power Query opened it up for me.     I just needed to click "Close & Load" to save and refresh the query providing data to the table.     The only thing at this point is that I didn't have my nice little sparklines as my regional decimal character is not a period - so I selected the time columns and did a "Replace All" from '.' to ',' to turn them into numbers instead of text.     Et Voila!   There you have it - ready to sort, filter, search and review to help you better understand which parts of your application may be overly resource hungry, or even to spot faulty equipment that may be communicating and triggering workflows far more often than it should.   Specific vs General Depending on the type of analysis that you're doing you might find that the aggregate statistics are a better option.  As they'll be far, far less that the entity specific statistics they'll do a better job of giving you a holistic view of the types of things that are happening with your ThingWorx applications execution.   The entity specific data set that I'm showing here would be a better choice for troubleshooting and diagnostics to try to understand why certain customers/assets/machines are behaving strangely as we can specifically drill into these stats.  Keep in mind however that you should then compare these findings with the general baseline to see how this particular asset is behaving compared to the whole fleet.   As a size guideline - I did an entity specific version of this file for a customer with 1,000 machines and the Excel spreadsheet was 7Mb compared to the 30kb of the one attached here and just opening it and saving it was tough for Excel (likely due to all of my nested formulas).  Just keep this in mind as you use this feature as there is memory overhead meaning also garbage collection and associated CPU usage for such.
View full tip
Thingworx Analytics is offered through the User interface called Analytics Builder with some pre-configured functionality. However, should you want to create your own jobs and mashups, all features from Analytics Builder and some more are available through the Thingworx Services.  Running most functionality requires that you provide some data to run the Analytics Services. This is where the datasetRef parameter is required.        Data uploaded through Analytics Builder Any dataset uploaded through builder will require have a datasetUri as shown in the image above and format will be parquet (all small letters) datasetUri can be obtained from the list of datasets in builder Passing data as an in-body Dataset If data isn't uploaded through Analytics Builder, data can be supplied as an Infotable in the data parameter of the datasetRef. Metadata will also need to be supplied if a new dataset is being created (create Job of the AnalyticsServer_DataThing) If this data is being supplied for a scoring job, as long as the column names match up to what the model is expecting, TWX Analytics will inference them appropriately. The filter parameter is for parquet datasets already uploaded into TWXA and will take an ANSI SQL statement format to add conditions to reduce number of rows. Exclusions is an single column infotable list of the columns you wish to remove from the job you are trying to submit Example: If you want Profiles to only run on 5 out of 10 columns, you would give a list of 5 columns that you don't want to include in this exclusions infotable. Data may also be supplied as a csv file in the file repo in some cases, in which case you would give the dataseturi parameter the location of the file on the TWX File repo (of the format thingworx://UseCaseFileRepo/tempdata.csv) and the format which would be csv
View full tip
Help the ThingWorx product team with some key strategic questions about developing apps in the cloud!   Let us know what you think here!   Stay connected, Kaya
View full tip
Hi Community,   Although we have reference architectures and integration paths for connecting devices to ThingWorx through Azure IoT; no one has ever written anything about doing the same from one ThingWorx to another.  I thought I’d change that and put some ideas out there around how one might go about doing this.  Although this is not officially supported or recommended by PTC; I have consulted with a number of leading SMEs on the subject, which have participated in forming the basis of my thinking outlined here.   Components Required (in order of communication path): On-premise ThingWorx Platform Protocol Adapter Toolkit* (CXS) - MQTT Azure IoT Edge Azure IoT Hub ThingWorx Azure IoT Hub Connector (CXS) Azure Cloud-hosted ThingWorx Platform   PAT (2) with codec to encode MQTT messages publishes to on-premise IoT Edge MQTT endpoint which handles store-and-forward of messages to IoT Hub.  An Azure IoT device would exist for each Thing you wish to represent on the ThingWorx servers.  The Azure IoT Hub Connector would pick-up the incoming messages and pass them on to the cloud ThingWorx which would decode the MQTT payload and map to Thing property updates.   The only part that I presently don’t like about this approach is that you’ll need to decode the MQTT messages on the ThingWorx platform in the cloud when they are received from the IoT Hub, and this mechanism will need to also need to handle encoding and publishing back to the IoT Hub if C2D (Cloud-to-Device) messages are to be implemented (aka bi-directional).  This is required as ThingWorx only supports AlwaysOn as an application level protocol so some form of mapping needs to be done.   * Another approach would be to replace the PAT with a custom agent which implements both the ThingWorx Edge SDK and the Azure IoT device SDK   Regards,   Greg Eva
View full tip
  Hello, everyone!   With the release of ThingWorx 8.5, we’ve incorporated a lot of new functionality into our manufacturing and service apps. To cover a few, I’ve included the list below. We created a manufacturing common layer extension to bundle all the PTC-offered IoT apps (Operator Advisor, Asset Advisor, Production KPIs and Controls Advisor) into one extension to enable you to use them even more quickly. We added a UI to Operator Advisor to strengthen your development of work instructions. We introduced new shift and crew data models and user interfaces to standardize how to track workers’ shifts and crew availability. We also introduced Flexible KPIs to help you more rapidly develop apps to calculate common metrics. We enhanced the Operator Advisor MPMLink connector to allow users to access navigation criteria for filtering parameters based on required criteria with support for standard processes. We incorporated multiple context supports for assets—like different business units, separating maintenance views from production views or segmenting sites by location—to allow segmentation based on role and responsibility, showing the power of ThingWorx networks and permissions.   Today, I’d like to highlight one of these areas in particular: flexible KPI calculations.   I spoke with one of product managers, Ward (who you may recognize from this post) to learn more about what this new feature does and the value it brings the business. Here’s what he said:   Kaya: Why did we create flexible KPIs? What was the challenge users were facing that led us to create them? Ward: While there is an industry standard for KPIs such as OEE, availability, productivity and quality, many customers choose to customize the calculations slightly and use their own specific versions in their decision-making process or production monitoring.    Kaya: What do the flexible KPIs do? Can you provide an example? Ward: KPIs can now be customized by ThingTemplate; this allows users to calculate KPIs differently for different “classes” of things. Imagine you have a group of CNC machines and a group of pumps. You want to calculate the availability of each group, but the availability calculation for the CNC machines may differ slightly from the same availability calculations for pumps. With our new flexible KPIs, you’re able to customize the availability calculation to make slight tweaks or changes based on differences in machines or devices. So, you can calculate the availability for both your CNC machines and for your pumps using your customized availability calculations. You can also create your own KPIs to calculate metrics like safety incidents or waste.   Kaya: Let’s dive a little deeper there. If I want to create a quality station for my robot with custom KPIs, how exactly would I do that? Ward: Let’s consider OEE. We have an OEE ThingShape applied to our ISA95 physical ThingTemplate. This shape has services to perform the OEE calculation. You’re able to customize the service on this template, so you have the flexibility to change the way you perform OEE calculations. Now, let’s say you want to add a new KPI like mean time between repair (MTBR). To do so, you would create a MTBR ThingShape and add it to the ThingTemplates where you want OEE calculated. Then, you would update the KPI manager service GetKPINames to add your ThingShape to the list of KPIs to be executed each iteration. The SCO apps will then execute your MTBR service along with the other KPIs.   Kaya: What are their use cases? How does they improve the business? Ward: Customers can have their cells roll up OEE based on the worse performing asset and have their operations roll up on a different criterion.  If the customer wants to use a modified OEE on a machine that includes the size of the crew operating it, they can now do so on that one machine, on classes of machines or on all machines.   Kaya: Wow. You were certainly busy with 8.5 with all these new features. Can you tell me what you’re most excited about for 9.0? Ward: I’m most looking forward to High Availability. The ability to have multiple servers in an active-active mode allows me to do more processing in ThingWorx and provide a level of reliability to my customers. (Look out for info on this exciting new functionality in the future!)   Ready to get started using the flexible KPIs yourself? Check out the ThingWorx Apps Customization Guide! While you’re at it, be sure to also check out the other new features in 8.5 listed above!   Reach out with any questions and stay connected! Kaya
View full tip
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. Connectors in ThingWorx are external integrations that can come in through an industrial system, like an MES that could be connected to with ThingWorx Kepware, or business system, like a CRM that could be connected to via ThingWorx Flow or REST APIs. It could also be a connection to an external database. These are your data connections, so their structure will be somewhat dependent upon your database and assets.   What does a Connector look like in use in a PTC Solution? If we use the example of Digital Performance Management (DPM), one of the connectors we use is a Database Manager(ptc.DBConnection.Manager). It pulls information from the database that is being used from the implementation of DPM. If you think of Building Blocks like bricks, Connectors are the foundation. In this case, the Database Manager sits at the bottom layer of bricks to connect the asset data to the next layer of bricks (Domain Models, which I will cover in the next post) and allows you to pull any information you need.   How can you use a Connector in your solutions? As mentioned above, a Connector is the foundation building block for most solutions. It is what aggregates and transfers your solution-related data into the ThingWorx platform for use. The Connectors we currently have available on the ThingWorx platform will “talk” to your database and the other building blocks you use in your solutions, so for your own solutions, a Connector will be the entry point of your data into your solution.   How can you adapt a Connector for your own solutions? Because all PTC building blocks are built with JavaScript in the ThingWorx Mashup Builder, you can leverage existing Connectors on the ThingWorx platform and extend these same Connectors for your unique use case or build your own. You can view the code we used to create Connectors, so if they don’t pull data into your solution the way you want it to flow, you can override the Connector’s functions with your own capabilities.   The ThingWorx PM team is here to listen to your thoughts and feedback, so tell us: What questions do you have about Connectors and how they can improve your experience building solutions in the ThingWorx platform? Or, if you are waiting for the full deep dive into Building Blocks, keep an eye out for our next post on Domain Models, where we will cover the next “layer up” of the types of Building Blocks for use in ThingWorx.   Stay Connected, Rachel  
View full tip
  You’ve seen him before. You’ve heard him before. Fans around the globe can’t get enough of him. He’s…   ...Joe Biron—our CTO of IoT!   Hear Joe share his thoughts on the future of the industrial IoT with ThingWorx in Episode 03 of our “ThingWorx on Air” podcast!   Any questions? Just Ask Kaya.   Stay connected!
View full tip
I've had a lot of questions over the years working with Azure IoT, Kepware, and ThingWorx that I really struggled getting answers to. I was always grateful when someone took the time to help me understand, and now it is time to repay the favour.   People ask me many things about Azure (in a ThingWorx context), and one of the common ones has been about MQTT communications from Kepware to ThingWorx using IoT Hub. Recently the topic has come up again as more and more of the ThingWorx expert community start to work with Azure IoT. Today, I took the time to build, test, validate, and share an approach and utilities to do this in cases where the Azure Industrial IoT OPC UA integration is overkill or simply a step later in the project plan. Enjoy!   End to end Integration of Kepware to ThingWorx using MQTT over Azure IoT (YoutTube 45 minute deep-dive)   ThingWorx entities for import (ThingWorx 9.0)   This approach can be quite good for a simple demo if you have a Kepware Integrator or Kepware Enterprise license, but the use of IoT Gateway for many servers and tags can be quite costly.   Those looking to leverage Azure IoT Hub for MQTT integration to ThingWorx would likely also find this recorded session and shared utilities quite helpful.   Cheers, Greg
View full tip
Applicable Releases: ThingWorx Platform 7.0 to 8.4   Description:   Strategy and tools for Thingworx application backups Backup Terminology and concepts Drivers to define a backup strategy Tips for executing backup in a Thingworx instance: Tomcat, certificates, Configuration and file system data, application specific files, database     Neo4J database mentioned in the session is no longer supported For more information check Best Practices for ThingWorx Backup
View full tip
Applicable Releases: ThingWorx Platform 7.0 to 8.4   Description:   A practical example of how to build a data model in ThingWorx following a pre-defined design Following topics are covered: Review existing Design Plan Build all required entities in ThingWorx Composer Test the model and review scalability and reusability         The session was recorded using the old ThingWorx Composer, but the concepts are still applicable Related Success Service - Principles of Thingworx Modeling Related Service - Design your Thingworx Model
View full tip
  Hi everyone,   This week, Anthony Moffa returns to Ask Kaya in a different form from his original appearance explaining the benefits of Thing Presence in ThingWorx. As much as we enjoy reading Anthony in print, you can now hear from the man himself in the “Moffa Monitoring Minute!”   Listen to Episode 04 of “ThingWorx on Air” as he explains what Asset Advisor is and how you can use it to remotely monitor assets, shorten service cycles, and improve visibility of your device fleet.   Want to learn even more about Asset Advisor? Check out this video or read through our website!   Reach out with any questions and just Ask Kaya!   Stay connected, Kaya
View full tip
 Image Source: https://www.thefire.org/resources/spotlight/     Designed a super cool mashup? Have an innovative IoT app? Are you really proud of how you solved an IoT challenge? Are you using ThingWorx for a unique use case?   If so, we want to hear from you! I’m looking for a few ThingWorx developers that are interested in sharing their work to be showcased on the Ask Kaya blog! (Don’t worry—we can hide your confidential info and only share what you allow us to.) We’d love to highlight what our developers are doing with ThingWorx out in the real world. If you’re interested, comment below or message me directly!   As always, stay connected.  
View full tip
Applicable Releases: ThingWorx Navigate 1.6.0 to 1.7.0   Description:   Covers how to configure ThingWorx Navigate to use Windchill Authentication: Background and Prerequisites X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKIX) Brief Introduction Steps to configure Thingworx Navigate with Windchill Authentication: Windchill Integration Runtime Thingworx Navigate     Additional Information Navigate SSL Configuration for Windchill Authentication General Checklist
View full tip
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 Dashboard The Production Dashboard allows for automated or manual data entry of reason codes with a simple interface for limited disruption. Rather than providing front-line workers with the typical, difficult to understand, percentage based KPIs, Production Dashboard standardizes all losses, so operators can proactively resolve issues during production. You can configure this dashboard to collect granular data and allow opportunities for continuous improvement in process tracking.     Focus with Bottleneck Analysis Bottleneck analysis automatically identifies bottlenecks across the manufacturing process. Identifying bottlenecks can help you prioritize the highest-impact opportunities in the business process. This saves you having to manually identify and analyze potential issues and frees you up to work on other projects.   Prioritize with Time Loss Waterfall and Analyze with Loss Reason Pareto Monitor and analyze performance with data visualizations that help you pinpoint root causes and suggest improvements. Bring together your siloed data into one system and create a standard for how performance is measured and reported.   Improve with Action Tracker Action Tracker allows you to create continuous improvement actions tied to real production losses, to ensure your actions are having positive impact and return.  Create a digital workspace for teams to collaborate and learn from each other. Plus, you can track the improvements delivered through each individual action, so you can drill down and create transparency of work being done.   Confirm value delivered with Scorecard (Available in Later Versions) With the Scorecard feature, you can leverage a standard scorecard for enterprise wide KPIs to summarize factory health and compare similar factory operations. Use the scorecard to create trending and reporting that can be filtered based on the audience you are presenting data to. The scorecard gives you a consistent view that measures performance across the network and drives visibility and accountability across your business.   How do you plan to leverage DPM or the building blocks that make it up? We’d love to hear your thoughts on the first manufacturing solution from PTC.   Stay connected, Rachel   
View full tip
  Hello everyone!   We’re back with Episode 08 of ThingWorx on Air! In this episode, I sit down with Ryan Servais, one of our High Availability (HA) experts on the ThingWorx product management team. We continue our HA discussion from previous Ask Kaya tech tips and cover some frequently asked questions like what are the benefits of active-active clustering? How does active-active clustering enable horizontal scale? How can I get started? Brand-new to active-active clustering? Check out these tech tips to start: 9.0 Sneak Peek: Active-Active Clustering for ThingWorx 9.0 Sneak Peek: ThingWorx Architecture for Active-Active Clustering 9.0 Sneak Peek: Flexible Deployments of Active-Active Clustering for ThingWorx Click here to listen to how active-active clustering can help you in a variety of scenarios: If you have a request overflow in production and your servers are slowing down, try out active-active clustering! If your IT admin keeps delaying replacing the network card on your HPE rack server and you keep losing connections, check out the power of active-active clustering! If your team is challenged to provision 1000s of additional assets into your system and you’re worried one server can’t handle it, use active-active clustering for horizontal scale! Finally, if you haven’t already, check out Ryan’s LiveWorx session with Senior IoT Product Manager Ayush Tiwari where they break down availability into its core components and explain how you can leverage active-active clustering to achieve key benefits like reduced downtime, increased cost savings, and more.   Enjoy!   Stay connected, Kaya
View full tip
   Who’s ready for exciting new functionality like smoother integration with Azure, rapid deployment capabilities, flexible KPIs and so much more?   Good news! Yesterday, we released ThingWorx 8.5—equipped with features like a new Azure connector for ThingWorx Flow, new software content management (SCM) capabilities with the Azure IoT Hub Connector, streamlined deployments with Solution Central, flexible KPI calculations with our PTC manufacturing and service apps—just to name a few. Check out the 8.5 release notes to discover all the highlights and goodness of our latest release and hear our CTO of IoT, Joe Biron (who you may recognize from previous Ask Kaya posts) and one of our product experience specialists, Sebastian Bergner, highlight new functionality and share demos in this exciting webcast (please note that we've had a little snafu with the link and the recording should be available later this week).   Play around with our new features by downloading ThingWorx 8.5, and let the good times roll.   Let us know what you think in the comments below and be on the lookout for future Ask Kaya posts highlighting new 8.5 functionality.   Stay connected, Kaya
View full tip
  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
View full tip
  Hello, ThingWorx Users!   As promised, we are back with Episode 02 of ThingWorx on Air. Listen to our PM Milan share the secrets of Operator Advisor and how we built the solution with an eye for IIoT developers.   Learn how Operator Advisor provides you with pre-built snippets of code for widgets, services, etc. targeted specifically for shop floor operators. No more starting from scratch!   Reach out if you have any questions or topic requests!   Stay connected, Kaya   P.S. Keep your ears peeled for the “Wowza Widget of the Week!”
View full tip
Background Getting 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 Analysis As 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/timestamp, and request URI; which can be decoded to reveal relevant details like the calling entities and service executions.   Adding 3 key additional variables (%s %B %D) to the server.xml access log value also gives us the HTTP response code, service execution time, and bytes returned from Tomcat.  This is super useful as we can now determine exact time of service executions, and run statistics on their execution totals and execution time.     Once you have an access log file looking like the one above, you can attempt to load it into the access_log sheet in the analysis Excel workbook that I created.  You do this by click on the access_log table, then selecting "Data > Get Data > Data Source Settings".  You'll then be prompted with the following or similar pop-up allowing you to navigate to your access_log file to select and then load.     It should be noted that you'll have to Refresh the table after selecting the new access_log.txt file so that it is read in and populates the table.  You can do this by right-clicking on the table and saying Refresh, or using the Data > Refresh button.   This workbook relies on a number of formulas to slice and dice the timestamp, and during my attempts at importing I had significant issues with this due to some of the ways that Excel does things automatically without any manual options.  You really need to make sure that the timestamps are imported and converted correctly, or something in the workbook will likely not work as intended.  One thing that I had to do was to add 1 second to round up 00:00:00 for the first entries as this was being imported as a date without the time part, and then the next lines imported as a date/time.   Depending on how many lines your file is, you'll likely also have to "Fill Down" the formulas on the right side of the sheet which may be empty in the table after importing your new data set.  I had the best results by selecting the cells in question on the last row, then going down to the bottom corner, pushing and holding Shift, clicking on the last cell bottom right, and then selecting Home > Fill > Down to pull the formulas down from the top.   Once the data is loaded, you'll be able to start poking around.  The filters and sorting by the named columns is really helpful as you can start out by doing things like removing a particular host, sorting by longest execution times, selecting execution times greater than 4 seconds, or only showing activity aimed at a particular entity or service.     You really need to make sure that the imported data worked fine and looks perfect, as the next steps will totally break if not.  With the data loaded, you can now go to the Summary Data table and right-click on one of the tables and select Refresh.  This is reload the data in into the pivot table and re-run their calculations.   Once the refresh is complete, you should see the table summary like shown here; there are Day, Hour, and Minute expand/collapse buttons.  You should also see the Day, Hour, Month fields showing in the Field Definitions on the right.  This is the part that is painful -- if the dates are in the wrong format and Excel is unable to auto-detect everything in the same way, then you will not get these automatically created fields.     With the data reloaded, and Pivot Tables re-built, you should be able to go over to the Dashboard sheet to start looking at and analysing the graphs.  This one is showing the Top 10 services organised into hourly buckets with cumulated service execution times.     I'm not going to go into all of the workbooks features, but you can also individually select a set of key services that you want to have a look at together across both the execution count and execution time dimensions.     Next you can see the coordinated view of both total service execution time over number or service executions.  This is helpful for looking for patterns where a service may be executing longer but being triggered the same amount of times, compared to both being executed and taking more time.  I've created a YouTube video (see bottom) which goes through using all of the features as well as providing other pointers to using it.     Getting into a finer level of detail, this "bonus" sheet provides a Pivot Table and Pivot Chart which allows for exploring minimum, maximum and average execution time for a specific service.  Comparing this with the utilisation subsystem metrics taken during the same period now provide much deeper insight as we can pinpoint there the peaks were, how long they lasted, and where the slow executions were in relation to other services being executed at that time (example: identifying many queries/data processing occurring simultaneously).     Without further ado, you can download and play with my ThingWorx Tomcat Access Log Analysis Excel Workbook, and check out the recorded demonstration and explanation for more details on loading and analysis use. [YouTube] ThingWorx Tomcat Access Logs - Service Performance Analysis
View full tip
Announcements