Digital Platforms

Increase Workplace Safety with Real-Time Locating Systems

Writing to you from ground zero here in Seattle, we have been monitoring and working with essential businesses throughout this pandemic. Just yesterday, a Tyson Foods plant in eastern Washington, reported that 100 of their workers tested positive for COVID-19. There is no doubt we have to rethink how we are going to get back to work in a safe manner and rethink how we conduct business.

DevOps: Continuous Deployment Using Git, Jenkins, and WinCC OA

In the IT world, you would NEVER, EVER, EVER make edits to a production system without going through the proper development quality assurance procedures. In the industrial world for some reason, it is acceptable to not test in isolated development environments for issues or changes in a production runtime system. There are many reasons for this…time, availability of tools, “know-how” etc. With the IT and OT worlds converging at an exponential pace, we want to help our industry adopt DevOps practices by showing the tools that are available now. DevOps tools can be leveraged in modern industrial data management software packages like WinCC Open Architecture.

WinCC OA: Setting up Chronograf with InfluxDB

With the release of WinCC OA 3.17, one of the newest and biggest changes is the addition of the NextGen Archiver. The NextGen Archiver runs on an InfluxDB database and is a great way to store your data. InfluxDB is one of the fastest-growing time-series databases in the market, which means there are already some fantastic tools that can be used to visualize your data coming out of WinCC OA. The tool I’m going to show today is Chronograf. Chronograf is the user interface for stand-alone instances of InfluxDB, but can also be used to inside of OA.