The best practice to access hundreds of remote file data

[seanccc]

Hi, 

My customer will has more than 700 devices connected to Thingworx.  Only need to read the data from the device. Each device has a work station connected to it , the work station is sold together with the device by the device provider and the device data is stored in the work station's file system and the operation system  are Windows system.   The Thingworx server and the work stations are in the same intranet. 

My ideas to accessing the device data are: 

1. Deploy edge SDK on each device to read the file  and send data to ThingWorx

2. Share the data folder of the work station of the device ,deploy only one edge SDK in Thingworx server(or a separated server) to scan all of the share folder to get the data. 

I prefer the #2 as it's must easier comparing to deploy hundreds of edge sdk .  But I'm new to Thingworx and not sure if it's the proper solution for the case, or has another better solution ?  Could you give me some advice  ?  

Thank you 

[PaiChung · Accepted solution]

Both work, I think option 1 gives you much more flexibility and ability to scale better.

since the Agent is designed to be firewall friendly as an out calling setup, if devices happen to not be on the intranet, or if the server were to move to a centralized or cloud location, the solution will still work.

it also will be a smaller footprint/less intensive on the agent - which could become a concern if many files have to be transferred at once.