IoT Tips

Reminder (and for some, announcement!) that the new ThingWorx 8 sizing guide is available here  https://www.ptc.com/en/support/refdoc/ThingWorx_Platform/8.0/ThingWorx_Platform_8_x_Sizing_Guide

This is a lessons learned write up that I proposed to present at Liveworx but it didn't make the cut, but I did want to share it with all the developer folks. Please note that this is before we added Influx and Micro Services, which help improve the landscape. Oh and it's long 🙂 ------------------------------------------ This is written as of Thingworx 8.2   Different ways to scale Data and Processing with Thingworx Two main issues are targeted Data Storage Platform processing Data Storage in Thingworx Background Issues around storage is that due to the limited indexing in the Persistence Provider with then the actual values according to the datashape being in a JSON Blob So when you look in the Persistence Provider you’ll see Source sourceType Location entityID Datetime Tags ValueJSONBlob   The first six carry an index, the JSON Blob which holds the values according to the datashape is not, that can read something like {value1:firstvalue,value2:secondvalue,value3:[ …. ]} etc. This means that any queries beyond the standard keys – date/time, entityID (name of Stream or DataTable), source, sourcetype, tags, location become very inefficient because it will query the records and then apply the datashape query server side. Potentially this can cause you to pull way more records over from Persistence Provider to Platform than intended. Ie: a Query on Temperature in my data, that should return 25 records for a given month, will perhaps first return 250K records and then filter own to 25. The second issue with storage is that all Streams are stored in one table in the Persistence Provider using entityID as an additional key to figure out which stream the record is for. This means that your record count per table goes up much faster than you’d expect. Ie: If I have defined 5 ValueStreams for 5 different asset types, ultimately all that data is still in one table in the Persistence Provder. So if each has 250K records, a query against the valuestream will then in actuality be a query against 1.25 million records. I think both of these issues are well known and documented? By now and Dev is working on it. Solution approaches So if you are expecting to store a lot of records what can you do? Archive The easiest solution is to keep a limited set and archive off the rest of the data, preferably into a client’s datalake that is not part of the persistence provider, remember archiving from one stream to another stream is not a solution! Unless … you use Multiple Persistence Providers Multiple Persistence Providers Thingworx does support multiple persistence providers for storing data. So you can spin up extra schemas (potentially even in the same DataBase Server) to be the store for additional Persistence Providers which then are mapped to a specific Stream/ValueStream/DataTable/Blog/Wiki. You still have to deal with the query challenge, but you now have less records per data store to query through. Direct queries in the Persistence Provider If you have full access to your persistence provider (NOTE: PTC Cloud Services does NOT provide this right now). You can create an additional JDBC connection to the Persistence Provider and query the stream directly, this allows you to query on the indexed records with in addition a text search through the JSON Blob all server side. With this approach a query that took several minutes at times Platform side using QueryStreamEntries took only a few seconds. Biggest savings was the fact that you didn’t have to transfer so many records back to the Platform server. Additional Schemas You can create your own schema (either within the persistence provider DB – again not supported by PTC Cloud Services) in a Database Server of your choice and connect to it with JDBC/REST. (NOTE: I believe PTC Cloud Service may/might offer a standalone server with actual root access) This does mean you have to create your own Getter/Setter services to retrieve and store information, plus you’ll need some event to store (like DataChange). This approach right now is probably a common if not best practice recommendation if historical information is required for the solution and the record count looks to go over 1 million records and can’t just be queried based on timestamp. Thingworx Event Processing Background Thingworx will consistently deal with many Things that have many Properties, and often times there will be Alerts/Rules that need to run based on value changes. When you are using straight up Alerts based on a limit value, this isn’t such a challenge, but what if you need to add some latch/lock/debounce logic or need to check against historical values or check multiple conditions? How can you design something that can handle evaluating these complex rules, holds some historical or derived values and avoid race conditions and be responsive? Potential Problems Race conditions Multiple Events may need to update the same Permanent or Temporary store for the determination of a condition. Duplicates If you don’t have some ‘central’ tracker, you may possibly trigger the same rule multiple times. Slow response You are potentially triggering thousands or more events at the same time, depending on how you’ve set up your logic, your response could become so slow that the next event will be firing before finish and you’ll overload the system. System queue overrun If your events trigger faster than you can handle the events, you will slowly build up and finally overrun the event queue. System Thread count overrun Based on the number of cores in your system, you can overrun the number of threads that can be handled. Connection Pool overrun Each read/write to a stream/datatable but also Property Persist is a usage of the connection pool to your persistence provider. If you fire a lot at once, you can stack up requests and cause deadlocks System out of memory Potentially in handling the events you are depending on in memory information, if that is something that grows over time, you could hit an ‘Out of Memory’ issue. Solution Approaches Batch processing Especially with Agents/Sources that write a set of property updates, you potentially trigger multiple threads that all may need the same source information or update the same target information. If you are able to process this as a batch, you can take all values in account and only process this as a single event and have just a single read from source or single write to target. This will be difficult to achieve when using something like Kepserver, unless it is transferring as something non-standard like MQTT. But if you can have the data come in as a single REST POST this approach becomes possible. In Memory vs. Table/Stream Storage To speed up response time, you can put necessary information into Memory vs. in a DataTable or Stream. For example, if you need the most current received record together with some historical values, you could: Use a Stream but carry the current value because the stream updates async. (ie adding the current value to the stream doesn’t guarantee that when you read from the stream it has already been committed) Use a DataTable because they are synchronous but it can make the execution slow, especially if you are reaching 100K records or more Use an InfoTable or JSON Property, now this information is in memory and runs the fastest and is synchronous. Note that in some speed testing JSON object was faster than InfoTable and way faster than DataTable. One challenge is that you would have to do a full overwrite if you need to persist this information. Doing a full write does open up the danger of a race condition, if this information is being updated by multiple threads at the same time. If it is ok to keep the information in memory than an InfoTable is nice because you can just add/delete rows in memory. I sadly haven’t figured out yet how to directly do this to a JSON object property :(. It is important to consider disaster recovery scenarios if you are only using this in memory Centralized Processing vs. Distributed Processing Think about how you can possibly execute some logic within the context of the Entity itself (logic within the ThingShape/ThingTemplate) vs. having it fire into a centralized Service (sync or async) on a separate Entity. Scheduler or Timer As much as Schedulers and Timers are often the culprit of too many threads at the same time, a well setup piece of logic that is triggered by a Scheduler or Timer can be the solution to avoid race conditions If you are working with multiple timers, you may want to consider multiple schedulers which will trigger at a specific time, which means you can eliminate concurrence (several timers firing at the same time) Think about staggering execution if necessary, by using the hated, looked down upon … but oft necessary … pause() function !!!! Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Asynchronous execution can give great savings on the processing speed of a thread, since it will kick off the asynch parts and continue on. The terrible draw back, you can’t tell when it is finished nor what the resulting output is. As you mix and match synch/asynch vs processing speed, you may need to consider other ways to pick up when an asynch process finishes, some Property elsewhere that will trigger into a DataChange for example. Interesting examples Batch Process With one client there was a batch process that would post several hundred results at once that all had to be evaluated. The evaluation also relied on historical information. So with some logic these properties were processed as a batch, related to each other and also compared to information held in memory besides historically storing the information that came in. This utilized several in memory objects and ultimately also an eval() statement to have the greatest flexibility and performance. Mix and Match With another client, they had a requirement to have logic to do latch/lock and escalation. This means that some information needs to be persisted, however because all the several hundred properties per asset are coming in through Kepware once a second, it also had to be very fast. The approach here was to have the DataChange place information into an in memory infotable that then was picked up by a separate latch/lock/escalation timer to move it over to the persistent side. This allowed for the instantaneous processing of DataChange and Alerts, but also a more persistent processing of latch/lock/escalation logic. In Conclusion Remember that PTC created its software for specific purposes. I don’t think there ever will be a perfect magical platform that will do everything we need and want. Thingworx started out on a specific path which was very high speed data ingest and event platform with agnostic all around connectivity, that provided a very nice holistic modeling approach and a simple way to build UI/UX. Our use cases will sometimes go right past everything and at times to the final frontier aka the bleeding edge and few are a carbon copy of another. This means we need to be innovative and creative. Hopefully all of you can use the expert knowledge you have about our products to create those, but then also be proactive and please share with everyone else!  

Installing an Open Source Time Series Platform For testing InfluxDB and its graphical user interface, Chronograf I'm using Docker images for easy deployment. For this post I assume you have worked with Docker before.   In this setup, InfluxDB and Chronograf will share an internal docker network to exchange data.   InfluxDB can be accessed e.g. by ThingWorx via its exposed port 8086. Chronograf can be accessed to administrative purposes via its port 8888. The following commands can be used to create a InfluxDB environment.   Pull images   sudo docker pull influxdb:latest sudo docker pull chronograf:latest   Create a virtual network   sudo docker network create influxdb   Start the containers   sudo docker run -d --name=influxdb -p 8086:8086 --net=influxdb --restart=always influxdb sudo docker run -d --name=chronograf -p 8888:8888 --net=influxdb --restart=always chronograf --influxdb-url=http://influxdb:8086     InfluxDB should now be reachable and will also restart automatically when Docker (or the Operating System) are restarted.

Warning This post is quite long, has various chapters and you might get bored reading it. If you just want a summary read the "Use case" and "Conclusion" chapter - and maybe the "Required Logic" chapter, because I made a cool graph for it. The rest is all about implementation... Introduction I recently had the opportunity to deliver a ThingWorx training for Saint Gobain. One of the use cases for their ThingWorx application is monitoring machine errors and outages on the production line. If an outage or error status is triggered, the machine operator will see a popup on the monitoring screen where he is forced to select a root cause. This root cause will then be persisted in ThingWorx for more data transformation, analytics and reporting - like cost analysis or optimization opportunities. During the training we were also discussing on how such a forced root cause monitoring can be implemented via Mashups and the usage of modal popups. I've compiled the details into this post as it might also interest other developers. The ThingWorx Entities I'm using in this example can be downloaded from here Note: I'm using the word "Alert" here - but not in the context of a ThingWorx Property Alert... just beware to not be confused due to the wording. Use Case One of the requirements for Saint Gobain's IoT Solution was an interactive alert monitoring directly in the factory on the production machines. Let's say the machine has stopped, the root cause should be recorded. For this an interactive popup will be displayed on the machine's monitoring display and an employee has to choose the root cause from a pre-defined list. This could be planned outages, e.g. for maintenance or unplanned outages, e.g. material jam. The root cause will then be recorded and a history of outage causes can be stored in a ThingWorx value stream. This can then be later analyzed with e.g. ThingWorx Analytics capabilities to understand and optimize the machine's production capabilities and efficiency. As the root cause must be entered, the popup will be forced to be displayed when a certain condition / criteria is met - and it will only disappar when a root cause is chosen. The user should not be able to interact with any other elements of the Mashup and not be able to just close the popup. The popup will close itself and reset the initial condition once the root cause has been identified and chosen. Requirements Required Entities Required Logic Note: Just to make it easier to manage and export Entities, I will add all of the created elements in a new Project called RootCausePopups. All of the elements will have a "rcp_" added in front of their name - just to make it easier for me to find and identify them. Implementation Before we start - set a Project Context Create Entities Create a Popup Mashup Create the Main Mashup Testing the Mashups Conclusion Certain conditions (like the state of a checkbox) can be used to trigger modal popups. A modal popup forces a user interaction and the interaction will not offer any other option until a choice is made. With these parameters it's easy to have mandatory reaction from users when it's important to capture data which rely on the analysis of an engineer or a user - e.g. reasons for machine outages. Using this technique there's not much training required for staff, other than pushing a button with an option of their choice - this saves quite some time in capturing data in any other way (e.g. updating Excel files or manual pen-and-paper techniques). As this data is now part of the ThingWorx instance it can be used for further transformation, analysis or just for monitoring purposes There's of course more possibilities when it comes to states and formatting which would exhaust the context of this post - but feel free to explore... In the example we wouldn't need the textbox, but it's there to demonstrate if the correct values are persisted or not In the example we could of course also set the visibility of the checkbox to false, so that we would only see the popup and the Grid holding historic information We could also create different StateDefinitions to color-format / text-format the input differently from the output in the Grid If you found this interesting (and actually made it to the end of this post) - feel free to play with this concept a bit more... The dependencies might seem a bit difficult, but it should be easy to implement and to adjust to your own ideas and requirements.

Previously Installing & Connecting C SDK to Federated ThingWorx with VNC Tunneling to the Edge device Installing and configuring Web Socket Tunnel Extension on ThingWorx Platform Overview     Using the C SDK Edge client configuration we did earlier, we'll now create above illustrated setup. In this C SDK Client we'll push the data to ThingWorx Publisher with servername : TW802Neo to ThingWorx Subscriber servername : TW81. Notice that the SteamSensor2 on the pulisher server is the one binding to the C SDK client and the FederatedSteamThing on subscriber is only getting data from the SteamSensor2. Let's crack on!   Content   Configure ThingWorx to publish Configure ThingWorx to subscribe Publish entities from Publisher to the Subscriber Create Mashup to view data published to the subscriber Pre-requisite Minimum requirement is to have two ThingWorx servers running. Note that both ThingWorx systems can be publisher & subscriber at the same time.   Configure ThingWorx Publisher   Configuring Federation Subsystem   1. Navigate to ThingWorx Composer > Subsystems > Federation Subsystems and configure the following highlighted sections   Essentially its required to configure the Server Identification, i.e. My Server name (FQDN / IP) , My Server Description (optional) Federation subscribers this server publishes to, i.e. all the server you want to publish to from this server. Refer to the Federation Subsystem doc in the Help Center to check detail description on each configurable parameter.   2. Save the federation subsystem   Configuring a Thing to be published   1. Navigate back to the Composer home page and select the entity which you'd like to publish 2. In this case I'm using SteamSensor2 which is created to connect to the C SDK client 3. To publish edit the entity and click on Publish checkbox, like so 4. Save the entity   Configure ThingWorx Subscriber     Configuring Federation Subsystem   1. Navigate to ThingWorx Composer > Subsystems > Federation Subsystems and configure the following highlighted sections   Essentially its required to configure the Server Identification, i.e. My Server name (FQDN / IP) , My Server Description (optional) Refer to help center doc on Federation Subsystems should you need more detail on the configurable parameter If you only want to use this server as a subscriber of entities from the publishing ThingWorx Server, in that case you don't have to Configure the section Federation subscribers this server publishes to, I've configured here anyway to show that both servers can work as publishers and subscribers   2. Save the federation subsystem   Configuring a Thing to subscribe to a published Thing 1. Subscribing to an entity is fairly straight forward, I'll demonstrate by utilizing the C SDK client which is currently pushing values to my remote thing called SteamSensor2 on server https://tw802neo:443/Thingworx 2. I have already Published the StreamSensor2, see above section Configuring a Thing to be published 3. Create a Thing called FederatedStreamThing with RemoteThingWithTunnels as ThingTemplate, 4. Browser for the Identifier and select the required entity to which binding must be done, like so   5. Navigate to the Properties section for the entity, click Manage Bindings to search for the remote properties like so for adding them to this thing:     6. Save the entity and then we can see the values that were pushed from the client C SDK     7. Finally, we can also quickly see the values pulled via a Mashup created in the subscriber ThingWorx , below a is a simple mashup with grid widget pulling values using QueryPropertyHistory service  

Get Started with ThingWorx for IoT Guide Part 1   Overview   This project will introduce you to the principles of ThingWorx Foundation by creating a working web application. Following the steps in this guide, you will create the building blocks of your first application for the Internet of Things (IoT). You will use ThingWorx Composer to create Thing Templates, which are then used to create Things that model the application domain. A simulator is imported to generate time-series data that is saved to a Value Stream. After modeling the application in ThingWorx Composer, you'll use Mashup Builder to create the web application Graphical User Interface (GUI). No coding is required in modeling the application, or in composing the web GUI that displays dynamically-generated data. NOTE: This guide’s content aligns with ThingWorx 9.3. The estimated time to complete ALL 5 parts of this guide is 30 minutes.      Step 1: Data Model   Model-based design with reusable building blocks makes your applications scalable and flexible. A ThingWorx application is built from Things, each based on a Thing Template that defines the common Properties (characteristics) and Services (behaviors) for a set of entities. Once a Thing Template is created, you can easily instantiate multiple Things without duplicating effort. In this tutorial, we will develop an application for a house including a thermostat, an electrical meter, and a sensor data simulator. We will demonstrate how to capture, store, and visualize data using the ThingWorx Foundation Server.   You will create Thing Shapes that model both a thermostat and an electric meter. You will then create a Thing Template that represents a house based on these shapes and other Properties.   Step 2: Create Thing Shapes Thing Shapes are components that contain Properties and Services. In Java programming terms, they are similar to an interface. In this section, you will build Thing Shapes for an electric meter and a thermostat. Meter Start on the Browse, folder icon tab of ThingWorx Composer. Under the Modeling section of the left-hand navigation panel hover over Thing Shapes, then click the + button.   Type MeterShape in the Name field. NOTE: Thing Shape names are case sensitive   If Project is not already set, choose PTCDefaultProject. Click Save. Add Properties Click Properties and Alerts tab at the top of your shape.   Click + Add. Enter the property name from the first row of the table below into the Name field of the Thing Shape Name Base Type Persistent? Logged? meterID STRING X   currentPower NUMBER   X costPerKWh NUMBER X X currentCost NUMBER     Select the Base Type from the drop-down menu that is listed in the table next to the Property name.   Check Persistent and/or Logged if there is an X in the table row of the Property. NOTE: When Persistent is selected, the property value will be retained when a Thing is restarted. Properties that are not persisted will be reset to the default during a restart. When Logged is selected, every property value change will be automatically logged to a specified Value Stream. Click ✓+ button. TIP: When adding multiple properties at once, click Done and Add after each, once you've entered a Name, selected a Base Type and any other criteria. If adding a single property, click Done. Repeat steps 2 through 6 for each of the properties in the rows of the table. Click the done ✓ Button. You'll see that these Properties have been created for the Meter Thing Shape.   Click Save. Thermostat This time we will use a shortcut to create a Thing Shape. In the top, left of the screen you will find +, click the new entity icon, then select Thing Shape from the list.   TIP: This is a shortcut you can use to create anything you can access from the Home tab in Composer. Type ThermostatShape in the Name field. If Project is not already set, choose PTCDefaultProject. Select the Properties and Alerts tab at the top. Click + Add and create the following properties following the same steps as before: Name Base Type Persistent? Logged? thermostatID STRING X   temperature NUMBER X X setTemperature NUMBER X X message STRING   X Click Save. You'll see that these Properties have been created for the Thermostat Thing Shape.       Step 3: Create Thing Template You can create reusable building blocks called Thing Templates in ThingWorx to maintain scalability and flexibility of your application development. With Thing Templates you define a set of similar objects by specifying the Properties (characteristics) and Services (behaviors) that are common for all the objects. In Java programming terms, a Thing Template is like an abstract class and can be created by extending other Thing Templates. Once a Thing Template is defined and saved in ThingWorx Foundation Server, you can replicate multiple Things to model a complete set without duplicating effort. In this step, you will create a Thing Template that defines properties for a building. This building Template could be used to create multiple Things that each represent a specific home, business, or other building structure. Start on the Browse, folder icon tab on the far left of ThingWorx Composer.   Under the Modeling section of the left-hand navigation panel, hover over Thing Templates and click the + button Type BuildingTemplate in the Name field. NOTE: Thing Template names are case sensitive If Project is not already set, click the + in the Project text box and select the PTCDefaultProject. In the Base Thing Template box, click + to choose GenericThing as the Template.   In the Implemented Shapes field, click the + to select the MeterShape Thing Shape.   Click Save. Add Properties In this step, you will specify the Properties that represent the characteristics of a building. Some Properties like the building location may never change (static), while other properties like power and temperature information may change every few seconds (dynamic). Select the Properties and Alerts tab under Thing Template: BuildingTemplate.   Click the Edit button if the Template is not already open for editing, then click + Add next to My Properties. Enter the property name in the Name field copied from a row of the table below, Select the Base Type of the property from the drop down menu. Check Persistent and/or Logged if there is an X in the table row of the Property. NOTE: When Persistent is selected, the property value will be retained during a system restart. Properties that are not persisted will be reset to the default during a system restart. When Logged is selected, every property value change will be automatically logged to a specified Value Stream. Click the ✓+ button. TIP: When adding multiple properties at once, click Check+ after each, once you've entered a Name, selected a Base Type and any other criteria. If adding a single property, click Check button. Repeat steps 3 through 6 for each of the properties in the rows of the table. Name Base Type Persistent Logged buildingID STRING x   building_lat_long LOCATION x   watts NUMBER x x After entering the final property, click the ✓ button. Click Save. You should see the following properties in your Composer.   In the next part of this introductory exercise, we will create a single Thing based on this Template to represent a house.

Hello everyone,   Following a recent  experience, I felt it was important to share my insights with you. The core of this article is to demonstrate how you can format a Flux request in ThingWorx and post it to InfluxDB, with the aim of reporting the need for performance in calculations to InfluxDB. The following context is renewable energy. This article is not about Kepware neither about connecting to InfluxDB. As a prerequisite, you may like to read this article: Using Influx to store Value Stream properties from... - PTC Community     Introduction   The following InfluxDB usage has been developed for an electricity energy provider.   Technical Context Kepware is used as a source of data. A simulation for Wind assets based on excel file is configured, delivering data in realtime. SQL Database also gather the same data than the simulation in Kepware. It is used to load historical data into InfluxDB, addressing cases of temporary data loss. Once back online, SQL help to records the lost data in InfluxDB and computes the KPIs. InfluxDB is used to store data overtime as well as calculated KPIs. Invoicing third party system is simulated to get electricity price according time of the day.   Orchestration of InfluxDB operations with ThingWorx ThingWorx v9.4.4 Set the numeric property to log Maintain control over execution logic Format Flux request with dynamic inputs to send to Influx DB  InfluxDB Cloud v2 Store logged property Enable quick data read Execute calculation Note: Free InfluxDB version is slower in write and read, and only 30 days data retention max.     ThingWorx model and services   ThingWorx context Due to the fact relevant numeric properties are logged overtime, new KPIs are calculated based on the logged data. In the following example, each Wind asset triggered each minute a calculation to get the monetary gain based on current power produced and current electricity price. The request is formated in ThingWorx, pushed and executed in InfluxDB. Thus, ThingWorx server memory is not used for this calculation.   Services breakdown CalculateMonetaryKPIs Entry point service to calculate monetary KPIs. Use the two following services: Trigger the FormatFlux service then inject it in Post service. Inputs: No input Output: NOTHING FormatFlux_CalculateMonetaryKPI Format the request in Flux format for monetary KPI calculation. Respect the Flux synthax used by InfluxDB. Inputs: bucketName (STRING) thingName (STRING) Output: TEXT PostTextToInflux Generic service to post the request to InfluxDB, whatever the request is Inputs: FluxQuery (TEXT) influxToken (STRING) influxUrl (STRING) influxOrgName (STRING) influxBucket (STRING) thingName (STRING) Output: INFOTABLE   Highlights - CalculateMonetaryKPIs Find in attachments the full script in "CalculateMonetaryKPIs script.docx". Url, token, organization and bucket are configured in the Persitence Provider used by the ValueStream. We dynamically get it from the ValueStream attached to this thing. From here, we can reuse it to set the inputs of two other services using “MyConfig”.   Highlights - FormatFlux_CalculateMonetaryKPI Find in attachments the full script in "FormatFlux_CalculateMonetaryKPI script.docx". The major part of this script is a text, in Flux synthax, where we inject dynamic values. The service get the last values of ElectricityPrice, Power and Capacity to calculate ImmediateMonetaryGain, PotentialMaxMonetaryGain and PotentialMonetaryLoss.   Flux logic might not be easy for beginners, so let's break down the intermediate variables created on the fly in the Flux request. Let’s take the example of the existing data in the bucket (with only two minutes of values): _time _measurement _field _value 2024-07-03T14:00:00Z WindAsset1 ElectricityPrice 0.12 2024-07-03T14:00:00Z WindAsset1 Power 100 2024-07-03T14:00:00Z WindAsset1 Capacity 150 2024-07-03T15:00:00Z WindAsset1 ElectricityPrice 0.15 2024-07-03T15:00:00Z WindAsset1 Power 120 2024-07-03T15:00:00Z WindAsset1 Capacity 160   The request articulates with the following steps: Get source value Get last price, store it in priceData _time ElectricityPrice 2024-07-03T15:00:00Z 0,15 Get last power, store it in powerData _time Power 2024-07-03T15:00:00Z 120 Get last capacity, store it in capacityData _time Capacity 2024-07-03T15:00:00Z 160 Join the three tables *Data on the same time. Last values of price, power and capacity maybe not set at the same time, so final joinedData may be empty. _time ElectricityPrice Power Capacity 2024-07-03T14:00:00Z 0,15 120 160 Perform calculations gainData store the result: ElectricityPrice * Power _time _measurement _field _value 2024-07-03T15:00:00Z WindAsset1 ImmediateMonetaryGain 18 maxGainData store the result: ElectricityPrice * Capacity lossData store the result: ElectricityPrice * (Capacity – Power) Add the result to original bucket   Highlights - PostTextToInflux Find in attachments the full script in "PostTextToInflux script.docx". Pretty straightforward script, the idea is to have a generic script to post a request. The header is quite original with the vnd.flux content type Url needs to be formatted according InfluxDB API     Well done!   Thanks to these steps, calculated values are stored in InfluxDB. Other services can be created to retrieve relevant InfluxDB data and visualize it in a mashup.     Last comment It was the first time I was in touch with Flux script, so I wasn't comfortable, and I am still far to be proficient. After spending more than a week browsing through InfluxDB documentation and running multiple tests, I achieved limited success but nothing substantial for a final outcome. As a last resort, I turned to ChatGPT. Through a few interactions, I quickly obtained convincing results. Within a day, I had a satisfactory outcome, which I fine-tuned for relevant use.   Here is two examples of two consecutive ChatGPT prompts and answers. It might need to be fine-tuned after first answer.   Right after, I asked to convert it to a ThingWorx script format:   In this last picture, the script won’t work. The fluxQuery is not well formatted for TWX. Please, refer to the provided script "FormatFlux_CalculateMonetaryKPI script.docx" to see how to format the Flux query and insert variables inside. Despite mistakes, ChatGPT still mainly provides relevant code structure for beginners in Flux and is an undeniable boost for writing code.  

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ThingTemplate   A ThingTemplate, at it's root is nothing but a class definition. Things are instances of a ThingTemplate which encapsulates business logic for a specific asset class.   This could be equated to that of a Class in an object-oriented programming concept. ThingTemplates provides initial state & implementation of behaviour for the Things implementing it. See ThingTemplates in Help Center & Similarities to Object-Oriented Programming for more.   ThingTemplate Use Cases   It's among the many building blocks for an IoT Solution which belong to the highest level objects created and maintained, i.e. Entities. There are several Entity Types in ThingWorx allowing users to model the physical world within the virtual realm of ThingWorx platform. There are following type of entities available within ThingWorx for modeling:   Things Thing Shapes Thing Templates Additional useful read Programming for the IoT Thing-Centric vs Traditional Query Approaches Model-View-Controller (MVC)   Ways to explore the out of the box provided ThingTemplates   All the available ThingTemplates can be listed and reviewed by navigating to the /Server via the ThingWorx REST API. List of ThingTemplates can be reviewed by using one of the following : <serverName>:<portNumber>/Thingworx/Server in a web browser and then locate and click on the ThingTemplates, or by; Typing <serverName>:<postNumber>/Thingworx/ThingTemplates in the web browser Either of the above listed options will display the following list in the web browser   List of ThingTemplates List shows all available ThingTemplates i.e. ThingTemplates that were provided OOTB and the ones that were created by the users as well. Using the column isSystemObject one can verify if the displayed ThingTemplate is provided OOTB or is custom one created by the user.   Accessing ThingTemplate Class description / details   This is covered under the JavaDocs for the ThingWorx Platform API, which can be accessed via the API Documentation   Search for ThingTemplate for following result   API Documentation: ThingTemplate While creating a custom ThingTemplate outside of ThingWorx composer, e.g. creating ThingWorx extension it is must to have following two entities in the metadata.xml file.     <Entities> <ThingTemplate> </ThingTemplate> </Entities> Note: If Eclipse Plugin is used for creating the ThingTemplate, above mentioned entries will automatically be created in the metadata.xml     Tips & tricks How to modify Base Template for a ThingTemplate for a Thing How to iterate through list of Things to identify their ThingTemplate & based on that set a particular property in those Things Add run time permissions through script to Thing Templates, Thing Shapes, etc Changing a Thing's implemented ThingTemplate after it has been created in ThingWorx Basic troubleshooting  Error "Thing [] is not running" when editing ThingTemplates in ThingWorx Troubleshooting Entity Relationship issues in ThingWorx Best Practises How to search for All entities in ThingWorx or by Thing Type How to create custom ThingTemplate when developing custom ThingWorx Extension Inheriting Permissions from a ThingTemplate      

This Best Practices document should offer some guidelines and tips & tricks on how to work with Timers and Schedulers in ThingWorx. After exploring the configuration and creation of Timers and Schedulers via the UI or JavaScript Services, this document will also highlight some of the most common performance issues and troubleshooting techniques.   Timers and Schedulers can be used to run jobs or fire events on a regular basis. Both are implemented as Thing Templates in ThingWorx. New Timer and Scheduler Things can be created based on these Templates to introduce time based actions. Timers can be used to fire events in a certain interval, defined in the Timer's Update Rate (default is 60000 milliseconds = 1 minute). Schedulers can be used to run jobs based on a cron pattern (such as once a day or once an hour). Schedulers will also allow for a more detailed time based setup, e.g. based on seconds, hours, days of week or days months etc. Events fired by both Timers and Schedulers can be subscribed to with Subscriptions which can be utilized to execute custom service scripts, e.g. to generate "fake" or random demo data to update Remote Things in a test environment. In general subscriptions and scripts can be used to e.g. run regular maintenance tasks or periodically required functions (e.g. for data aggregation) For more information about setting up Timers and Schedulers it's recommended to also have a look at the following content:   How to set up and configure Timers How to set up and configure Schedulers How to create and configure Timers and Schedulers via JavaScript Services Events and Subscriptions for Timers and Schedulers   Example   The following example will illustrate on how to create a Timer Thing updating a Remote Thing using random values. To avoid any conflicts with permissions and visibility, use the Administrator user to create Things.   Remote Thing   Create a new Thing based on the Remote Thing Template, called myRemoteThing. Add two properties, numberA and numberB - both Integers and marked as persistent. Save myRemoteThing. Timer Thing   Create a new Thing based on the Timer Template, called myTimerThing. In the Configuration, change the Update Rate to 5000, to fire the Event every 5 seconds. User Context to Administrator. This will run the related services with the Administrator's user visibility and permissions. Save myTimerThing. Subscriptions   To update the myRemoteThing properties when the Timer Event fires, there are two options: Configure a Subscription on myRemoteThing and listen to Timer Events on the myTimerThing. Configure a Subscription on myTimerThing and listen to Timer Events on itself as a source. In this example, let's go with the first option and Edit myRemoteThing. Create a new Subscription pointing to myTimerThing as a Source. Select the Timer Event Note that if no source is selected, the Timer Event is not availabe, as myRemoteThing is based on the Remote Thing Template and not the Timer Template Enable the Subscription. In the Script area use the following code to assign two random numbers to the Thing's custom properties: me.numberA = Math.floor(Math.random() * 100); me.numberB = Math.floor(Math.random() * 100); Save myRemoteThing. Validation   The Subscription will be enabled and active on saving it. Switch to the myRemoteThing Properties Refreshing the Values will show updates with random numbers between 0 and 99 every 5 seconds (Timer Update Rate).   Performance considerations   Timers and Schedulers are handled via the Event Processing Subsystem. Metrics that impact current performance can be seen in Monitoring > Subsystems > Event Processing Implementing Timers and Schedulers on a Thing Template level might flood the system with services executions originating from Subscriptions to Timer / Scheduler triggered Events. Subscribing to another Thing's Events will be handled via the Event Processing Subsystem. Subscribing to an Event on the same Thing will not be handled via the Event Processing Subsystem, but rather execute on the already open in memory Thing. If Timers and Schedulers are not necessarily needed, the Services can be triggered e.g. via Data Change Events, UI Interactions etc. Recursion can be a hidden performance contributer where a Subscription to a certain Event executes a service, triggering another Event with recursive dependencies. Ensure there are no circular dependencies and service calls across Entities. If possible, reads for each and every action from disk should be avoided. Performance can be increased by storing relevant information in memory and using Streams or Datatables or for persistence. If possible, call other Services from within the Subscription instead of handling all code within the Subscription itself. For full details, see also Timers and Schedulers - Best Practice   How to identify and troubleshoot technical issues   Check the Event Processing Subsystem for any spikes in queued Events (tasks submitted) while the total number of tasks completed is not or only slowly increasing. For a historical overview, search the ApplicationLog for "Thingworx System Metrics" to get system metrics since the server has been (re-) started. In the ApplicationLog the message "Subsystem EventProcessingSubsystem is started" indicates that the Subsystem is indeed started and available. Use custom loggers in Services to get more context around errors and execution in the ScriptLog Custom Loggers can be used to identify if Events have fired and Subscriptions are actually triggered Example: logger.debug("myThing: executing subscribed service") For issues with Service execution, see also CS268218 Infinite loops in Services could render the server unresponsive and might flood the system with various Events To change the timing for a Timer, restarting the Thing is not enough. The Timer must be disabled and enabled at the desired start time. Schedulers will allow for a much more flexible timing and setting / changing execution times in advance. For further analysis it's recommended to generate Thread Dumps to get more information about the current state of Threads in the JVM. The ThingWorx Support Tools Extension can help in generating those. See also CS245547 for more information and usage.

Create a new Thing using the Timer Thing Template. The Timer Thing will fire a Timer Event when the Timer's Update Rate has expired. The event is automatically present and does not need to be added manually. Configuration   The Timer Configuration is quite straightforward. It can be accessed via the Thing's Entity Configuration. Configuration allows for Enabling the Timer on Thing-Startup - whenever the Thing is started, e.g. when restarting ThingWorx or via the RestartThing Generic Service, also the Timer is enabled and will fire Events. Changing the Update Rate - in which intervall the Events will be fired (by default every minute [60000 milliseconds]). Changing the User Context - in which the Events will be handled. The user will need visibility and permission on e.g. executing Services or depending Things, which are required to run the Service triggered by the Event.           Services   Timer Things inherit two Services by default from the Thing Template DisableTimer EnableTimer These will activate / de-activate the Timer and allow / disallow firing Events once the Update Rate has expired If a Timer is currently enabled or disabled can be seen in its properties  

Connectors allow clients to establish a connection to Tomcat via the HTTP / HTTPS protocol. Tomcat allows for configuring multiple connectors so that users or devices can either connect via HTTP or HTTPS.   Usually users like you and me access websites by just typing the URL in the browser's address bar, e.g. "www.google.com". By default browsers assume that the connection should be established with the HTTP protocol. For HTTPS connections, the protocol has to be specified explictily, e.g. "https://www.google.com"   However - Google automatically forwards HTTP connections automatically as a HTTPS connection, so that all connections are using certificates and are via a secure channel and you will end up on "https://www.google.com" anyway.   To configure ThingWorx to only allow secure connections there are two options...   1) Remove HTTP access   If HTTP access is removed, users can no longer connect to the 80 or 8080 port. ThingWorx will only be accessible on port 443 (or 8443).   If connecting to port 8080 clients will not be redirected. The redirectPort in the Connector is only forwarding requests internally in Tomcat, not switching protocols and ports and not requiring a certificate when being used. The redirected port does not reflect in the client's connection but only manages internal port-forwarding in Tomcat.   By removing the HTTP ports for access any connection on port 80 (or 8080) will end up in an error message that the client cannot connect on this port.   To remove the HTTP ports, edit the <Tomcat>\conf\server.xml and comment out sections like       <!-- commented out to disallow connections on port 80 <Connector port="80" protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="443" /> -->     Save and restart Tomcat. If opening Tomcat (and ThingWorx) in a browser via http://myServer/ the connection will fail with a "This site can’t be reached", "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED" error.   2) Forcing insecure connections through secure ports   Alternatively, port 80 and 8080 can be kept open to still allow users and devices to connect. But instead of only internally forwarding the port, Tomcat can be setup to also forward the client to the new secure port. With this, users and devices can still use e.g. old bookmarks and do not have to explicitly set the HTTPS protocol in the address.   To configure this, edit the <Tomcat>\conf\web.xml and add the following section just before the closing </web-app> tag at the end of the file:     <security-constraint>        <web-resource-collection>              <web-resource-name>HTTPSOnly</web-resource-name>              <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>        </web-resource-collection>        <user-data-constraint>              <transport-guarantee>CONFIDENTIAL</transport-guarantee>        </user-data-constraint> </security-constraint>     In <Tomcat>\conf\web.xml ensure that all HTTP Connectors (port 80 and 8080) have their redirect port set to the secure HTTPS Connector (usually port 443 or port 8443).   Save and restart Tomcat. If opening Tomcat (and ThingWorx) in a browser via http://myServer/ the connection will now be forwarded to the secure port. The browser will now show the connection as https://myServer/ instead and connections are secure and using certificates.   What next?   Configuring Tomcat to force insecure connection to actually secure HTTPS connection just requires a simple configuration change. If you want to read more about certificates, encryption and how to setup ThingWorx for HTTPS in the first place, be sure to also have a look at   Trust & Encryption - Theory Trust & Encryption - Hands On

ThingWorx Manufacturing Tips & Tricks Webinar is a weekly opportunity to hear PTC Subject Matter Experts present on various topics related to the manufacturing space and applications.   Agenda for this week's recorded session - - Manufacturing Apps Overview - Christine Bahmer - Insight CM Integration - Aron Semle - 3rd Party Systems Integration - Varathan Ranganathan - Q&A  

ThingWorx Manufacturing Tips & Tricks Webinar is a weekly opportunity to hear PTC Subject Matter Experts present on various topics related to the manufacturing space and applications.   Agenda for this week's recorded session - - Manufacturing Apps Overview - Christine Bahmer - Installing the demo Factory - Varathan Ranganathan - Installing the custom Plant Layout App - Varathan Ranganathan - Q&A  

ThingWorx Manufacturing Tips & Tricks Webinar is a weekly opportunity to hear PTC Subject Matter Experts present on various topics related to the manufacturing space and applications.   Agenda for this week's recorded session - - Manufacturing Apps Overview - Christine Bahmer - PTC Sigma Tile IoT Starter Kit, Presented by Serge Romano    

ThingWorx Manufacturing Tips & Tricks Webinar is a weekly opportunity to hear PTC Subject Matter Experts present on various topics related to the manufacturing space and applications.   Agenda for this week's recorded session - - Overview & Application Demo - Aron Semle - Architecture Overview - Varathan Ranganathan - Q&A  

ThingWorx Manufacturing Tips & Tricks Webinar is a weekly opportunity to hear PTC Subject Matter Experts present on various topics related to the manufacturing space and applications.   Agenda for this week's recorded session - - Overview and demo of the MFG Apps - Aron Semle, Solution Manager - Licensing Options - Serge Romano, VP Manufacturing -Installation Options and configuration of the apps - Varathan Ranganathan, SME - Q&A  

Video Author:                     Stefan Taka Original Post Date:            July 14, 2017 Applicable Releases:        ThingWorx 7.4   Description: 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 Community.   NG Composer feature availability  

Video Author:                     Durgesh Patel Original Post Date:            June 12, 2017 Applicable Releases:        ThingWorx   Description: In this video we review the different features available in Grid Advanced Extension version 2.0.  

Video Author:                     Polina Osipvoa Original Post Date:            June 10, 2016 Applicable Releases:        ThingWorx   Description: This is a video tutorial on creating a Media Entity, and importing and displaying an image.      

Video Author:                     Polina Osipova Original Post Date:            June 10, 2016   Description: This is a video tutorial on configuring properties for a Thing, and using "Manage Bindings" to bind properties to a Thing.