IoT & Connectivity Tips

This Expert Session will walk you through the complete installation of ThingWorx Analytics from the Prerequisites to Confirming the Installation is successful and all steps in between. The first half of the video gives a breakdown of the components and the process of the installation with the second half being an actual Demo of the Installation.   For full-sized viewing, click on the YouTube link in the player controls.   Visit the Online Success Guide to access our Expert Session videos at any time as well as additional information about ThingWorx training and services.

This Expert Session is about platform sizing with dependency on the type of environment and correlated scalability options. It talks about federation and high availability as well as provides visual diagrams to understand the architecture of different ThingWorx solutions.   For full-sized viewing, click on the YouTube link in the player controls.   Visit the Online Success Guide to access our Expert Session videos at any time as well as additional information about ThingWorx training and services.

This blog is intended to help diagnose and fix the most common issues that may be encountered when working with ThingWatcher. It cannot be stressed strongly enough that you should be familiar with your data including the average time interval between data points, and the collection duration and certainty threshold you specified. Before you start troubleshooting ThingWatcher, check that result and training microservices is running. For testing result microservices open a web browser and paste result URL; http://<IP of microservices>:<Port of results microservices>/results/models (e.g., http://localhost:8096/results/models) For testing training microservices open a web browser and paste training URL; http://<IP of microservices>:<Port of training microservices>/training (e.g., http://localhost:8091/training) If you see either: {"values":[],"total":0,"next":null,"previous":null} or a list of training jobs in JSON format, this means the result and training microservice service is available. 1. Question. I haven't seen an anomaly but I believe that my 'property' is anomalous?         This can be caused by different reasons, here are the most common causes: The certainty is too high. If the certainty is too high ThingWatcher is conservative in its categorization of "true positives" and therefore may emit more "false negatives". Reducing the certainty will change this behavior but note that ThingWatcher may now categorize too many "false positives" as a result. In other words, ThingWatcher may detect the desired anomalies but also some non-anomalies. The 'property' is anomalous during training data collection. If ThingWatcher creates a predictive model from anomalous data, it may not be able to detect the desired anomalies during MONITORING because the data does not really appear to be anomalous. So ThingWatcher treats this pattern as 'normal'. Therefore, ensure that 'property' values are also non-anomalous during training. There are long time gaps during the monitoring state so ThingWatcher stays in Buffering and categorizes these data points as non-anomalous. 2. Question. ThingWatcher detects an anomaly but my 'property' is non-anomalous? The certainty might be too low. In this case, ThingWatcher reports anomalies when the incoming data pattern looks even slightly different from the expected data pattern. ThingWatcher might need more training data. If the 'property' data has a pattern that occurs over a long time span, ThingWatcher needs to collect multiple cycles of all these patterns in order to detect a true anomaly without emitting too many false positives. 3. Question. ThingWatcher is in FAILED State, why?     There are many possible reasons for a failed state, here are the most likely problems that can cause a failed state. ThingWatcher emits a FAILED ThingWatcher State because the training service has not been setup or is down. similarly, the result service is not available. NotemessageText=Unexpected exception. {Throwable=[ConnectException: Operation timed out}]]messageText=Unexpected exception. {Throwable=[ConnectException: Connection refused}]]. Note that ThingWatcher is still able to collect all training data and you will only begin to see these failed states after ThingWatcher tried to post the training request. ThingWatcher emits a FAILED ThingWatcher State because time gaps prevent the data collection for training.You will see this warning in the log messages : "A long time gap was detected in the data that is greater than the threshold of {n}". This means you have a long gap in the training data and ThingWatcher will recollect the data. If there are more than 3 recollections due to a long time gap, ThingWatcher transitions to a failed state and will not be able to recover. In this case you can either instruct ThingWatcher to retrain and try again or check the data source to make sure it does not have long gaps. 4. Question. Why does ThingWatcher remain in Buffering? There are many possible reasons for ThingWatcher to remain in Buffering, but the most likely issue is time gaps which cause ThingWatcher to remain stuck in Buffering. If the incoming data regularly contains long time gaps, you will notice that ThingWatcher keeps alternating between the monitoring and buffering states. You may need to provide better quality data i.e. more evenly spaced data. Source: Alex Meng, Specialist Software Engineer

An introduction to installing the ThingWorx platform. Information on the environment, prerequisites, and configuration steps when installing ThingWorx. Includes walkthroughs of installing with H2 and PostgreSQL databases, an introduction and demonstration of the Linux installation script, solutions to common installation problems and more.     For full-sized viewing, click on the YouTube link in the player controls.   Visit the Online Success Guide to access our Expert Session videos at any time as well as additional information about ThingWorx training and services.

Key Functional Highlights Production Advisor is now available in the Freemium and Developer Kit downloads. Plant Managers are provided with real-time monitoring of production status and critical KPI’s such as utilization, performance, quality and OEE, by unifying data from disparate lines, assets and sensors. With Production Advisor, Plant Managers have the ability to detect and react instantly to production issues- reaching lower downtime, higher production throughput and better quality from the factory resources. Compatibility ThingWorx 8.0.1 KEPServerEX 6.2 KEPServerEX V6,1 and older as well as different OPC Servers (with Kepware OPC aggregator) Documentation ThingWorx Manufacturing Apps Setup and Configuration Guide: https://support.ptc.com/WCMS/files/173133/en/ThingWorxManufacturingAppsSetup_8-0-1.pdf ThingWorx Manufacturing Apps Customization Guide: https://support.ptc.com/WCMS/files/173135/en/ThingWorxManufacturingAppsCust_8-0-1.pdf Get Started Documentation on Portal: https://www.ptc.com/en/thingworx/manufacturing-apps/Dashboard/Get-Started (PTC users should use their normal login credentials and do not need to register on the portal) Download Freemium and Developer Kit (8.0.1) are available for download here: https://www.ptc.com/en/thingworx/manufacturing-apps/Dashboard (PTC users should use their normal login credentials and do not need to register on the portal ThingWorx Platform Extensions (8.1.0, released 1 Nov 2017) are available for download here: https://support.ptc.com/appserver/auth/it/esd/product.jsp?prodFamily=TWA

This has been moved to its new home in the Augmented Reality Category in the PTC Community.

This is a useful trick for rolling up metrics in Thingworx across various levels of a hierarchy by using Networks, ThingShapes, and recursive service definitions. Say that you have a hierachy of Things in your model such as a Global view, a Region view, and a Store view -- this could be a Mfg Plant, a Building, an Asset, etc; whatever the core metric producing Thing is in your model -- where your Store has KPIs that you want to roll up across regions and globally. First, create a template for each of your hierarchical levels. In my case it is a GlobalTemplate, RegionalTemplate, and StoreTemplate. Add a property to your StoreTemplate that will be the KPI. Now, create a Thing for the Globe, and each of your Regions and Stores. Add them to a hierachical Network as such: Now, we need to create a ThingShape to aggregate our KPIs and apply it to the Global, Regional, and Store template. Now we will define a recursive funciton on our ThingShape called GetKPI ​and define it with the following: //define our base case, when the thing template we are on is the lowest level of our hierarchy, in this case the StoreTemplate if (me.thingTemplate == "StoreTemplate") {     //in our base case, the result is just the property for the metric we want to aggregate     result = me.someMetric } else {     //otherwise, we are at some other level in the hierarchy and we need to get our child connections from the network     //this gets all the things below us in the network     var params = {         name: me.name /* STRING */     };     // result: INFOTABLE dataShape: NetworkConnection     var network = Networks["Network"].GetChildConnections(params);     //loop through each of the things below us in the hierarchy and recursively add the result of GetKPI() to our result     result = 0;     for each (var row in network.rows) {             result += Things[row.to].GetKPI();     } } This is a simple case of just summing up a single property, but we can take this further using the Union and Aggregate snippets provided by thingworx to do other kinds of summarization. First add a new property called someAvgMetric ​to our StoreTemplate, and define a new service GetKPIProperties as such, with an InfoTable result, on the StoreTemplate varparams = {     propertyNames: {"items": ["someMetric", "someAvgMetric"]} /* JSON */ }; // result: INFOTABLE dataShape: "undefined" var result = me.GetNamedProperties(params); Now, define a new service on our ThingShape to utilize this service as our base case, and aggregate the resulting InfoTable when necessary. We'll call this service GetKPIAggregates: //define our base case if (me.thingTemplate == "StoreTemplate") {     //this function will be on the StoreTemplate, and returns the base infotable     result = me.GetKPIProperties() } else {     //grab our network     var params = {         name: me.name /* STRING */     };     // result: INFOTABLE dataShape: NetworkConnection     var network = Networks["Network"].GetChildConnections(params);     //need to create an empty infotable to union into. I glossed over this, but you'll need a datashape here     //create empty infotable     var result = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].CreateInfoTableFromDataShape({ infoTableName: "InfoTable", dataShapeName: "KPIDataShape" });     //loop through and union each of our results to our new infotable     for each (var row in network.rows) {         var params = {             t1: result /* INFOTABLE */,             t2: Things[row.to].GetKPIAggregates() /* INFOTABLE */         };         var result = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].Union(params);     }     //aggregate each of our fields     var params = {         t: result /* INFOTABLE */,         columns: "someMetric,someAvgMetric" /* STRING */,         aggregates: "SUM,AVERAGE" /* STRING */,         groupByColumns: undefined /* STRING */     };     // result: INFOTABLE     var result = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].Aggregate(params);     //need to loop through each of our field names and make them match our base infotable     // infotable datashape iteration     var dataShapeFields = result.dataShape.fields;     for (var fieldName in dataShapeFields) {         var stringName = dataShapeFields[fieldName].name;         var params = {             t: result /* INFOTABLE */,             from: stringName /* STRING */,             to: stringName.split("_")[1] /* STRING */         };         // result: INFOTABLE         var result = Resources["InfoTableFunctions"].RenameField(params);     } } Now, in our mashups, we can use a DynamicThingShape and call our GetKPIs service at any level in our network, and our data will be aggregated correctly for whatever level we are at in the hierarchy!

This has been moved to its new home in the Augmented Reality Category in the PTC Community.

Sometimes it's needed to delete the existing PostgreSQL database, especially if a different major version was installed at first by mistake (for example, 9.6 in place of the supported 9.4). Then it's absolutely necessary to ensure the database is fully deleted and there is no db ghosts. The proper way to uninstall is to go to the postgresql server installation directory and find one uninstall-postgresql file. Double click on the Uninstall-postgresql file to run the un-installer- it will un-install postgresql. In case the uninstall wasn't performed correctly, below are the manual steps to clean it up. One sign of existing "ghost" db, is randomly seeing a second PostgreSQL server in the pgAdmin III or experiencing "error"-less problems when running the ThingWorx installation scripts. To uninstall manually,in this example we will use 9.6 as the version to delete - please replace with your own where needed: Remove the postgresql server installation directory. (rd /s /q "C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.6") Assuming default location. Delete the user 'postgres' (net user postgres /delete) Remove the Registry entries. (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PostgreSQL\Installations\postgresql-9.6) and (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PostgreSQL\Services\postgresql-9.6) Remove the postgresql-9.6 service. (sc delete postgresql-9.6)

This example provides the ability to generate a simple entity structure and some historical data for each entity. Historical data is run through a ThingWorx service to generate histogram data for display in a bar chart.  The provided ThingWorx entities and PDF document provide the example as well as documentation.

Introduction SAP HANA database is among the several options available for ThingWorx as persistence provider, in this blog I'll share the experience and challenges I had while setting up the SAP HANA and then configuring it to run as Persistence Provider for ThingWorx Pre-requisite Eclipse Mars or higher SAP Hana Express Edition 2.0 ThingWorx Hana Persistence Provider Package​ Setting up SAP Hana SAP Hana Express Edition 2.0 is freely available from SAP via the download with a pre-built machine with SUSE Enterprise OS. For this blog I used the SAP Hana Express Edition 2.0 Server only version while downloading the pre-built VM from SAP Download the Server only or Server + Application VM from the SAP's website           2. Unzip and open the hxe.ova (file name will differ if you are downloading the server + application VM) file in one of the hyper-visor, in my case I'll be using VMWare Workstation, but should work just fine with others e.g. Oracle VirtualBox      3. Once opened in a hypervisor SUSE will boot up and you will be prompted for the new password, as VM is configured for force first time password change      4. If you are unsure of the next steps to follow refer to the Getting Started with SAP Hana express edition guide which is selected by default and gets downloaded when the VM is downloaded      5. Another thing to note about the PDF that it contains all the details on the username and password required for initial setup      6. Provide the password for the OS user which is hxeadm, note you can always refer to the PDF file which we downloaded while downloading the VM from SAP's download manager      7. Once the password is changed for the OS user, you will also be prompted to change the master DB user's password as well      8. Make note of these passwords SAP HANA DB Instance After completing the initial steps for setting up the VM and changing the password we can now check the pre-built database installed on the VM which is called as SystemDB. You can check that and same basic settings running on the instance by using the following command in the shell $ HDB info This command will print out the features and components installed on the VM, if you are using Server only VM as I did you shall see something of this printed on the shell. In case it doesn't show up you can start the database and check again of the running services $ HDB start The output will be something like this, note the highlighted part for below output already include couple of additional services that is because i have already created the ThingWorx Database : FYI: If you wish to shut down the database you can use following command: $ HDB Stop With this let's move to the next step to create the new database which will be used by the ThingWorx application. One thing to note that you can run the SAP Hana in multi-tenant or in single tenant mode. With the free edition i.e. the SAP Hana Express Edition multi-tenant is the only available option. This is why we will create the ThingWorx DB and the schema and use that to populate it with the required tables and other DB entities needed to support the persistence provider from ThingWorx webapp Creating and configuring the ThingWorx Database with ThingWorx Schema For this you'll be required to download from the PTC Software download page the package for the ThingWorx with SAP Hana Persistence provider package which contains the DB creation scripts. You can now choose to create the schema in two ways i.e.      a. Creating and Configuring the Database using PTC provided Bash Scripts      b. Manually Creating and configuring the SAP Hana Database Both of these details are covered in the Getting Started with SAP Hana and ThingWorx Guide For this blog I created everything manually that is by connecting via the client which i have installed as plugin in my existing Eclipse Mars. If you are running different version of Eclipse check this link If you are also using the Eclipse Mars you can use this link in Eclipse > Help > Install New Software > https://tools.hana.ondemand.com/mars/ Once installed make sure to restart the eclipse and open the SAP Hana Administration Console perspective, which should come up something like this: Since I have already installed and created some connections to the DB they are visible on the left side of the Eclipse. Creating Connection to the SAP Hana Database      1. Navigate to the Systems tab on the left in the SAP Hana Administration Console perspective in Eclipse      2. Click on the Add Systems icon located right on the Systems tab, like so      3. Provide some basic connection details like           a. Host Name: IP or machine name of the VM running the SAP Hana Express edition           b. Instance Number: 90           c. Mode: If you are using free express edition as I have used for this blog you will be required to select Multiple containers. As soon you will see that we will create ThingWorx as tenant DB alongside the System DB           d. Select System Database since for now we have not yet created a database called ThingWorx. Click next.      4. On the next page provide the username/password, i will be logging in as SYSTEM user since I have not yet created any other user and I'll use the master DB password which I'd set when      configuring the VM for the first time.      5. Click Finish to complete and test the connection Creating ThingWorx User and ThingWorx Database Successful connection creation will show the connection with green icon under the Systems tab which will allow you to then explore the connection for different objects existing under the SYSTEM database. To begin using the SQL statements select the connection and click on the SQL tab as highlighted in the screenshot below: With this you have now successfully created the connection and also have a SQL client to execute SQL tasks As mentioned previously you have two options to setup the schema and the data model for the ThingWorx Database, these are      1. Using the shell script to create and configure the ThingWorx Database and it's schema together with the required User and the data model. For this you will need following:           a. thingworxHanaDatabaseSetup.sh           b. thingworxHanaSchemaSetup.sh Note: These two shell scripts will call the SQL procedures provided in the install folder ThingWorx-Platform-Hana-X-X-X.zip you have downloaded from the PTC Software Download ThingWorx-Platform-Hana-X-X-X.zip package incorrectly provides sample platform-settings.json with PostgresPersistenceProviderPackage configuration for ThingWorx Installation. So make sure that user executing those scripts should have all the required files in place, preferably in same folder as the script files and should have sufficient access rights to execute the scripts      2. The other option is to do everything manually i.e. create Database and it's schema, it's user and the data model via the SQL scripts provided in the install folder Both of these options are covered quite in detail in the installation guide so I'd recommend referring to that for step by step process. For creating a SQL connection using the newly created TWADMIN user follow the steps described in the section Creating Connection to the SAP Hana Database above. Here's how the configuration for connecting to the ThingWorx DB will look like With this we are now connected to an empty THINGWORX database under which TWADMIN schema will be created using the SQL scripts provided in the install directory of ThingWorx-Platform-Hana-X-X-X.zip package. Note that it's important that below listed scripts are executed in following order      1. thingworx-model-schema.sql      2. thingworx-data-schema.sql      3. thingworx-property-schema.sql      4. thingworx-data-proc.sql Checking the port for ThingWorx Database created in SAP Hana This can be checked by executing the following command directly from the SQL Client in the Eclipse. You may need to execute this command using SYSTEM user account, if any permission objections are raised in the client select * from "SYS_DATABASES".m_services This will return the result of all the databases and services with their port, check the SQL Port for the ThingWorx database : Configuring the SAP Hana Persistence Provider Now that we have met all the pre-requisites to connect to the our ThingWorx Database in SAP HANA let's configure the platform-settings.json file under placed under the \\<ThingworxInstallationDirectory>\ThingworxStorage\ Note: The sample platform-settings.json included with the downloaded ThingWorx-Platform-Hana-X-X-X.zip package incorrectly includes the PostgresPersistenceProviderPackage. A Jira is already filed and can be tracked via this knowledge base article ThingWorx-Platform-Hana-X-X-X.zip package incorrectly provides sample platform-settings.json with PostgresPersistenceProviderPackage configuration for ThingWorx Installation As a workaround for now, make sure to replace the PostgresPersistenceProviderPackage with HanaPersistenceProviderPackage, like so { "PersistenceProviderPackageConfigs": { "HanaPersistenceProviderPackage": { "ConnectionInformation": { "driverClass": "com.sap.db.jdbc.Driver", "jdbcUrl": "jdbc:sap://<IPAddressForSAPHana>:39041/?autocommit=false&currentschema=TWADMIN", "dbSchema": "TWADMIN", "username": "TWADMIN", "password": "Thingworx123", "acquireIncrement": 5, "acquireRetryAttempts": 50, "acquireRetryDelay": 10000, "checkoutTimeout": 1000000, "fetchSize": 5000, "idleConnectionTestPeriod": 60, "initialPoolSize": 5, "maxConnectionAge": 0, "maxIdleTime": 0, "maxIdleTimeExcessConnections": 300, "maxPoolSize": 100, "maxStatements": 100, "minPoolSize": 5, "numHelperThreads": 8, "testConnectionOnCheckout": false, "unreturnedConnectionTimeout": 0                }           }      }     } Configuring Tomcat to connect to SAP Hana ThingWorx Database Thingworx SAP Hana persistence provider connects to the SAP Hana database instance using the ngdbc.jar. As mentioned in the Getting Started with SAP Hana and ThingWorx guide this jar is required to placed under the  <TomcatInstallationDirectory>\lib location (for more detail see ThingWorx SAP Hana Guide). You can obtain this jar by installing this SAP Hana Client or SAP Hana plugin installed in Eclipse. Note: Currently there's a known issue around ThingWorx failing to connect to SAP Hana Express Edition v2.0 due to the use of newer version of ngdbc.jar i.e. v2.0 or above. A Jira, already filed for this, can be tracked in this PTC Knowledgebase Article : Tomcat fails to start with error "Failed to create com.thingworx.persistence.hana.HanaPersistenceProviderPackage. Cause was due to 'null'" when installing ThingWorx with SAP Hana Persistence Provider You can download the jar directly from SAP Hana webpage with a valid service account. Since the older version is not available for direct download without service account from the SAP's download page, this jar can be obtained by installing the old Eclipse e.g. Kepler and then install the SAP Hana plugin on top of it which includes the jar version 1.XX in the folder created by the SAP Hana Tools For more detail on installing and configuring Tomcat or setting up the license file refer to the ThingWorx Core Installation guide Verifying the installation Finally, start the Tomcat service and try to access the ThingWorx Composer by typing in the URL e.g. http://localhost:8080/Thingworx You can also verify the connectivity between the ThingWorx and the SAP Hana by navigating to the application.log located under ThingworxStorage\logs and look for INFO [T: localhost-startStop-1] Database initialization complete. This will confirm the database was initialized and connected to successfully Common connectivity issues Issue 1: After deploying and starting up the Tomcat you may see that the ThingWorx webapp is stalling despite logging the message that the database initialization started Cause: This could happen for variety of reasons e.g.      a. Incorrect port was used in the JDBC connection URL in the platform-settings.json      b. ThingWorx database is incorrectly spelled      c. Connection is timing out e.g. due to network issues Solution:      a. For port ensure that correct port is used by executing this command to verify on which port the database service listening      b. Connection retries could be increased in the platform-settings.json file      c. Reconfirm the correct username Issue 2: Application log in ThingWorx Tomcat would log the error that persistence provider is null Cause: Incorrect jar version is used. Solution:      a. Recheck the jar version which has been used under tomcat\lib folder

Learning is a wide domain and thus, the field of machine learning has branched into several sub fields dealing with different types of learning tasks. Supervised vs Unsupervised Learning Since learning involves an interaction between the learner and the environment, we can divide tasks according to the nature of the interaction. Consider the task of detecting the hand written numbers among the lots of digital numbers vs task of anomaly detection. For the hand-written numbers detection task, we consider a setting in which the learner receives a set of training numbers, labeled as ‘Hand-Written’ and ‘Digital’. On the basis of such training, the learner should figure out a rule for labeling a newly arriving number. In contrast, for the task of anomaly detection, all the learner gets, as a training is a large set of numbers, without any labels on it, and the learner’s task is to detect ‘unusual’ numbers. Consider learning as a process of ‘using the experience to gain expertise’. Supervised learning describes a scenario in which the ‘experience’, a training example, consist significant information (labels Hand-Written or Digital) that is missing in the future arriving numbers, to which the learned experience is to be applied. Here, the acquired expertise is aimed at predicting the missing information for the validation data. However, in unsupervised learning, there is no difference between the training data and validation data. The learner processes input data with the goal of coming up with some summary or compressed version of the data. Clustering a data set into subsets of similar objects is a good example of such task. There is also an intermediate learning setting in which, the training set contains more information than the validation set. The learner here is required to predict even more information for the validation set. Consider a game of chess, where a value function describes each setting of a chess board. Now one may want to learn the degree why which White’s position is better than the black’s. The only information available to the learner at the training time is positions that occurred in an actual chess game and who won it. Such learning frameworks are investigated under reinforcement learning. Source: ‘Understanding machine learning: From theory to algorithms’ written by Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Shai Ben-David

Check out this new KCS article which links to all known best practice documents available for ThingWorx. This article will get larger in time as more articles are published related to the Dos and Don'ts of building an IoT application! Do you know when to use timers, and where to implement their subscriptions? How about ensuring info tables are used at the proper time, and data tables at others? Pesky performance issues wherein ThingWorx runs slow for apparently no reason? All of these questions and more are addressed here!

Persistent properties are stored in ThingWorx database while non-persistent properties are stored in memory. This means that the persistent values do not get erased or deleted if the thing restarts or platform restarts. The persistent properties can also be retrieved in the same way as non-persistent properties. To explain better how we can retrieve persistent data, please consider the below example: I took a device group which has multiple devices and defined 2 persistent properties. One is serial number and the other is firmware version number. Now in a mashup builder, the user gives the serial number and the corresponding firmware version will be retrieved. I achieved this by writing services for that thing. Created a Data shape with the name DeviceData and defined two filed definitions. One is Serial number and the other is firmware version. Created a thing template with the name DevGroup. Added a property in the thing template with the name DeviceData and selected the basetype as info table. Also selected the previously created data shape (Device Data) in data shape field. And made this property as persistent data by selecting Is Persistent. Saved the property. Created two devices with the names Device1 and Device2. Both the devices use the above template. Now for each device set the property values by clicking the set button in properties link. These values will be persistent, meaning they do not change even after refresh or when you restart ThingWorx. You can even set these properties at run time by just creating a service. Created GetFirmversion service which retrieves the firm version of given service number. Created mashup as shown below: . Once you select Device1, enter the serial number in the numeric entry field and click query button, the firmware version of the given serial number is displayed along with the data of device1. If we enter a wrong number, no data will be displayed. You can also set an error message instead of displaying empty values. Similar case when we select the device2 data. This is one way to retrieve persistent data. You can also obtain the same in many ways.

This video will provide you with a brief introduction to the New Composer interface, which has been made available in the 7.4 and later releases of the ThingWorx Platform.  For complete details on what functionality is available within this next generation composer interface, and to also see what lies ahead on our road map, please refer to the following post in the ThingWorx Community: NG Composer feature availability

I've been working with the 7.x and 8.x versions of Thingworx over the last several months doing integrations. So I have a few development instances I've been working with. I'd like to go over some of the issues I've encountered and provide some potential best practices around how you work with Thingworx in development mode and transition to production. Typically, I'll create an instance and develop the integration using the Administrator user which is the only user created as you start up Thingworx instances. Lately, I've been having trouble with a lot of authentication failures as I build. Problem number 1: The new User Lockout feature. Around 7.2 a new User Lockout feature was added to Thingworx to help prevent brute-force cracking of passwords. You now are allowed only so many authentication failures in a given period of time before the user is automatically put in lock mode for a number of minutes. Unfortunately, (but realistically in a more secure manner), a lockout appears as more authentication failures. In reality, it is because the user you have just successfully authenticated to has been automatically locked. I came very close to wiping out an entire instance because I just couldn't get signed in. Then I remembered the lockout, so I worked on something else for a while and then tried to get back into the server and I was successful because the lock timeout had expired. To see the settings in your system, look at the User Management Subsystem configuration page. The Account Lockout Settings default to 5 failures in a 5 minute period that will result in a 15 minute lockout. One note is that setting the lockout to 0 doesn't disable it, it permanently locks out the account. It will have to be reset by a member of the administrators group. The screenshot below shows Problem number 2: AppKeys There is a new setting in the PlatformSubsystem that by default prevents the use of AppKeys in a URL. This setting is present because it is more secure. If you use an appKey as a query parameter in a URL, the appKey will be logged as clear text in your web browser's access log. This is a security risk - an AppKey, especially one not using a whitelist setting might make it possible for someone to gain access to your system by managing to see the access log for your system (maybe via some log analysis tool you feed your logs to). You can disable this setting, but it is not recommended for production - you may have to for a while because you may have code that uses this technique that must be updated before you can enforce the policy. You should deal with this in your production systems as soon as practical. See the graphic below on where this setting shows up. Problem number 3: REST API testing ​As a Thingworx developer, you're probably aware of tools like Curl, Postman and even the Web Browser that can let you exercise a REST API as you develop your code so you can validate your functionality. The REST guidelines specify that you should use the GET method to retrieve data, PUT to create data, POST to update data, etc. The issue is that it is easiest to test an API call if you can execute it from a web browser. However, the web browser always uses the GET method to make a request. This means that PUT and POST (along with other methods) will not work from your browser. Thingworx originally interpreted the incoming request and would internally reroute incoming requests to the POST or PUT functionality. This is also insecure because it makes it too easy to execute services from a browser. A setting was added to the PlatformSubsystem allow for a gradual transition to the more secure configuration. Turn this on in developer mode to simplify your testing of REST calls, but you should not leave it on in production mode as it provides a potential attack vector for your server. So I have some recommendations: 1) Set up an additional Administrative user upon installation If you only have one user defined and it gets locked out, you're stuck until the lockout times out. Worse, if for some reason you set the timeout value to 0, you're locked out forever by Thingworx. You're only choice will be to hack the database to unlock the user or to wipe out the instance and start over. I just went through a situation where I did create the second user and forgot to add it to the Administrators group. So I did something else for 20 minutes to make sure the lockout had cleared. Then I added the user to the Administrators group but got distracted and never pressed the Save button so it locked up again. Make sure you have the user created and functional immediately upon installing the instance - don't wait until you're getting locked out by some loop that's not authenticating properly. Even if you were logged in as your Administrator user, the lockout will cause a failure the next time you try to do something in Composer, like turn off the lockout checkbox! 2) Test your REST Calls with Curl or Postman - not the web browser Don't test your code in a loop until you've tested it in isolation to be sure it's not going to fail authentication for some reason (which may include violating the PlatformSubsystem settings above). Don't use the browser to do the testing - it will require disabling the secure settings. Use Curl or even better, Postman or a similar tool to test your REST calls - it will give you better formatted output than Curl. And you can easily put appKey in as a header (where it should be) instead of a parameter on the URL or in the body. 3) Tighten up your appKeys where possible. Since an appKey is effectively a user/password replacement, you should protect them in the same manner - keep them out of log files by not allowing them as URL parameters, and use the whitelist to keep them from being used for other purposes. If you have a server to server connection, whitelist the server who will be making the calls to you. What I'm not sure of is just whether this is really IP addresses only or if you can use a DNS name and it will look up the IP address and insure it is in fact coming from the expected source. Someone else might be able to comment on this. 4) Test with the PlatformSubsystem settings off Make sure you can run your server without the method redirect or appKey as parameter settings in the PlatformSubsystem. Those settings are potential security vulnerabilities. You may find some Thingworx code that requires one or the other of those settings. Please be sure to report this through PTC Tech Support so it can be fixed.

There are a few recommended troubleshooting steps to alleviate this: 1. The best practice is to install without an existing Tomcat implementation. Verify whether Tomcat is currently installed on this PC. If so, uninstall Tomcat and run the installer again. 2. Assign a different port for the servlet engine. This can be changed within the server.xml file located here: <Install path>\ThingWorxManufacturingApps\PTC_Servelet_Engine\conf\server.xml 3. If the installer has stopped at approximately 90% complete, and 5 minutes have elapsed, start the ThingWorx Servlet Engine Service manually from this directory in the Windows Explorer: <Install path>\ThingWorxManufacturingApps\PTC_Servlet_Engine\bin\thingworxServerw.exe 4. The Servlet Engine log files can be used for advanced troubleshooting. They are located in this directory by default: <Install path>\ThingWorxManufacturingApps\PTC_Servlet_Engine\logs

When installing KEPServerEX, you will be presented with a tree of features to install. Open the pull-down menu next to "Full install" and select "Entire feature will be installed on local hard drive." This will ensure all needed drivers and plug-ins are included. When either a Client application has made a request of a Driver, or a Plug-in becomes activated, then a license check is performed. If a feature is not licensed, a two-hour demo countdown period will begin. For more information on this, see: KEPServerEX V6 Demo Timer

The KEPServerEX installer download is available from the My Kepware web portal: https://my.kepware.com/mykepware/ It will be necessary to create a new My Kepware account if you have not already done so. When you log in to your My Kepware account, you will be at the My Kepware Home page. In the left column, you will see a link to download the latest release. You can access all of the features of KEPServerEX with this installation, including the Thingworx Native Interface. For more information on installation of KEPServerEX, see this guide: https://www.kepware.com/en-us/products/kepserverex/documents/installation-guide.pdf

The ThingWorx Manufacturing Apps download includes both a setup.exe (for installation) and an uninstall.exe (for uninstallation).

Starting with ThingWorx Manufacturing Apps 8.1, a Connection Info box was added to Controls Advisor that will display the Configuration settings needed in KEPServerEX. In Controls Advisor, select the server instance you are connecting with, then select the Key icon Be sure the information displayed here matches the settings you have in place in your KEPServerEX Project Properties in the ThingWorx property group.