In a factory environment, collecting data to gain useful insights from various sources is challenging because it requires connecting to many different types of automation systems, plcs and devices that often speak different languages. This is the problem that German industrial software company, inray (specialized in data communication between software systems and components in Industry 4.0, IoT and IIoT) set out to solve for its customers.

The larger an enterprise becomes, the more systems and applications there are to monitor, and the more scalable its monitoring system has to be to keep up with business growth. This is the challenge that RingCentral — which provides cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions for businesses — faced and solved.

We released a new Modbus input plugin in Telegraf 1.14 and in this blog I’d like to tell you more about that plugin and how you can use it. Modbus is a messaging protocol for industrial devices that was developed by Modicon (now Schneider Electric) for main-secondary communication between these intelligent devices. It has become an ideal protocol for remote terminal units (RTUs) where wireless communication is necessary.

In a previous post, I demonstrated how to call InfluxDB APIs from AWS Lambda, but the setup is fairly manual and the results are not portable. Ideally, we as a community can expand and share ways to collect and process time series data. To that end, I want to share a CloudFormation template. CloudFormation is AWS’ infrastructure as code service that lets you define almost any AWS component in a configuration file.