Supporting Services

Introduction

The Supporting Services layer consists of a range of data processing microservices that provide the following:

• Edge decision-making, rules and analytics in low-latency mission-critical systems.
• Visualisation and dashboard presentation of the edge data
• Scheduling of data collection and other key events
• Alerts and notifications
• Provision other services
• Sparkplug B communication

Supporting services include:

• Rules Engine: the edge analytics service that performs if-then conditional actuation at the edge based on sensor data collected by Edge Xpert.
• Scheduler: an internal clock that will initiate an action for any Edge Xpert service. When the specified time is reached, the service will call the API URL of any Edge Xpert service via REST to trigger an operation.
• Alerts and Notifications: allows Edge Xpert services to send out an alert or notification to another system or to a person monitoring Edge Xpert.
• Provision: a one-off service that can provision other Edge Xpert services. Typical provisioning use cases include, but not limited to, adding device profiles or devices into Core Metadata, adding flows into Node-RED, and adding data sources or dashboard into Grafana.
• Sparkplug: a service that acts as the Sparkplug B Edge of Network (EoN) node to communicate with other Sparkplug-enabled nodes, such as SCADA/IIOT host.

As part of the Edge Xpert distribution, IOTech provides the following supporting services:

• InfluxDB
  
  InfluxDB is an open source time series database. It can be deployed at the edge to complement the storage provided by Core Data.
  
  For examples of using InfluxDB with Edge Xpert, see InfluxDB and Grafana Example.
  
  For further information on InfluxDB, refer to the InfluxDB documentation
  
  
• Grafana
  
  Grafana is an open-source visualisation tool. It allows you to create dashboards for your data. Grafana can easily integrate with InfluxDB due to the provided datasource plug-in, which connects to and streams data from InfluxDB.
  
  For examples of using Grafana with Edge Xpert see Grafana
  
  For further information on Grafana, refer to the Grafana documentation
  
  
• Node-RED
  
  Node-RED is an open-source development tool, which provides a browser-based flow editor to connect flows using nodes in the Node-RED palette. It also provides a module that allows you to create live dashboards for the data. Edge Xpert can deliver data to Node-RED. You can create rules and analytics to define how to handle, interpret and take action on data using javascript-based APIs. Node-RED can send commands back to Edge Xpert, which means you can also write rules to control the devices managed by the Edge Xpert Device Services.
  
  For examples of using Node-RED with Edge Xpert, see NodeRED.
  
  For further information on Node-RED, refer to the Node-RED website.
  
  
• eKuiper
  
  eKuiper is a lightweight, SQL-based rules engine, which is used for IoT data analytics and streaming applications at the edge.
  
  For information on using Edge Xpert with eKuiper see eKuiper Overview