Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), has announced the general availability of AWS IoT SiteWise, a managed service that collects data from the plant floor, structures and labels the data, and generates real-time key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to help industrial customers make better, data-driven decisions. Customers can use SiteWise to monitor operations across facilities, quickly compute industrial performance metrics, create applications that analyze industrial equipment data to prevent costly equipment issues, and reduce gaps in production. This allows customers to collect data consistently across devices, identify issues with remote monitoring more quickly, and improve multi-site processes with centralized data. To learn more about SiteWise, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/iot-sitewise.
Industrial companies like manufacturers, energy utilities, and food processors want to utilize their equipment data to drive faster and better-informed decisions, but much of this data cannot easily be collected, processed, or monitored. Extracting data from thousands of sensors and equipment across different locations is time-consuming and expensive because sensor data is often stored locally in specialized servers that lack a common data format, and retrieving the data and placing it in a format useful for cross-site analysis requires significant developer resources and expertise. Once developers have a data collection pipeline to aggregate data across different pieces of equipment, they still have to attach context, such as the equipment type, facility location, and relationship to other equipment. Customers then have to write custom applications to calculate and compare performance metrics across multiple facilities to drive operational insights.
SiteWise helps customers overcome these challenges by making it easier to collect data from the plant floor, structure and label the data, and generate real-time metrics. In SiteWise, customers begin by modeling their industrial equipment, processes, and facilities by adding context (e.g. equipment type and facility location) to the collected data, and defining common industrial performance metrics (e.g. overall equipment effectiveness and uptime) on top of the data using SiteWise’s built-in library of mathematical functions. Once a customer’s environment is modeled and their data ingested into AWS, the service automatically computes the metrics at the interval defined by the customer (e.g. report uptime every hour). All uploaded data and computed metrics are sent to a fully managed time series database, which is uniquely designed to store and retrieve time-stamped data with low latency, making it significantly easier for customers to analyze equipment performance over time. From within the SiteWise console, customers can also create custom web applications (without any coding) to visualize key metrics across end-user devices in near real-time. These portable web applications can help customers monitor equipment performance on any web-enabled desktop, tablet, or phone to spot anomalies, helping them reduce waste, make faster decisions, and optimize their plant performance.
“Industrial customers tell us that getting their data into the cloud and using it to understand their operational performance is the biggest opportunity they see when evaluating IoT solutions,” said Dirk Didascalou, Vice President of IoT, AWS. “With SiteWise, industrial customers can now use the power of AWS to collect, organize, and monitor their industrial equipment data at scale. SiteWise will help industrial customers move beyond data collection and enable them to visualize and monitor all their equipment, so they can focus on their main job of optimizing their operations.”
In addition to using software running on an edge device, SiteWise provides interfaces for collecting data from modern industrial applications through MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messages or its Application Programming Interface (APIs). SiteWise is available today in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland) AWS regions, with additional regions coming soon.