Integrating Falkonry with Azure IoT
Key takeaways:
- Get plant-level operational visibility of all assets and processes by using your existing operational data with Falkonry on Microsoft Azure.
- Falkonry fits seamlessly into the Microsoft Azure IoT reference architecture, by leveraging Azure IoT Hub and OPC publisher, making your IoT data readily available for AI and analytics.
- The Falkonry SaaS service automatically organizes your time series data and stores it in your preferred Azure Data Lake container, combining the convenience and low overhead of SaaS with data control, retention and jurisdiction.
The Industry 4.0 model of manufacturing extracts greater efficiencies from plant operations by infusing smart technologies. While this sounds promising, implementing such a digital transformation is often impeded by a number of hurdles. Integrating assembly lines, IoT devices, data, analytics and finally people is always a challenge. Even more challenging is the complex AI modelling needed to gain meaningful insights from integrating these various components.
This is where Falkonry’s patented AI technology comes in. It allows for real-time condition discovery, classification, root cause explanations, reporting and visualization, all under a simple and intuitive interface with Falkonry Clue.
And the best way to put Clue to work is via Azure IoT.
How Falkonry leverages Azure IoT
Falkonry Clue applies advanced analytics to multivariate time-series data to discover meaningful patterns. This valuable operational data is supplied to Clue’s powerful AI engine by leveraging Microsoft Azure’s IoT infrastructure. Clue is designed to fit seamlessly into Azure’s reference architecture thereby easing the integration process.
Connecting the plant to the cloud, the Azure IoT Hub acts as a bi-directional communications brain for all connected IoT devices – managing data transfers, updates, setting up credentials for every device, and defining access control policies. These connected devices include OPC UA enabled sources such as most SCADA systems that support the MQTT protocol for data transfer.
At the plant level, another component of the Azure IoT architecture, which is built on top of the IoT Hub – IoT Edge – handles certain workloads within the plant network itself for situations where latency is critical. IoT Edge also helps when there is intermittent connectivity to the cloud by temporarily storing upstream data and syncing it when connectivity is restored. A module within IoT Edge – OPC Publisher – provides support for connecting to an OPC UA client or server without requiring any system changes and also without the need to open the on-premises firewall. The IoT Hub pulls all this data onward via the Azure IoT protocol gateway or through the OPC Publisher, from where it becomes available to be used by Falkonry Clue.
Falkonry Clue can accept two types of data – real time data streamed via direct IoT gateway integration, and periodic file-based data transfers. The real time portion of this data is ingested from Azure Event Hubs. A custom piece of technology developed by Falkonry, called the Falkonry Connector, which is built using Azure components such as Azure Stream Analytics and Azure Function, enables further data transmission. With Stream Analytics, the Connector can subscribe to sources like Azure Event Hub, Azure IoT Hub and Azure Data Lake Storage to receive data, while Azure Function helps in sending the data to Falkonry in real-time.
Through this connector design approach, Falkonry provides data sovereignty, management, and access control to its customers. The communication channel is made secure via certificate-based authentication. Falkonry Clue also lets customers pick their preferred backend storage for storing time-series data. Azure Data Lake Storage is one of the supported backend storages to store the signal data and the output produced by Falkonry. It is secure and enables high scalability without creating data silos, allowing customers to get a well-organized time series data repository with prediction output from Falkonry Clue. This data can be further used by customers (if needed) via tools like Azure Databricks or Power BI for additional visualization.
Why use Falkonry on Azure IoT
Compliance and control: Falkonry Clue leverages the infrastructure security and proactive compliance that comes with Microsoft Azure. All data transfers from Azure IoT Hub to Falkonry’s AI engine and vice versa use certificate-based authentication. Additionally, the Azure Blob Filesystem driver (ABFS) uses a secure protocol to read&write to Azure Data Lake Storage. This ensures that the customer retains data control and auditability over edge-to-cloud security policies.
Quick time to value: Plug-and-play activation is baked into Falkonry Clue, and hence connecting industrial data sources to it is a quick and easy process, requiring only a few hours of attention from your IT team. As the data starts to flow from your IIoT assets, Falkonry’s AI begins to learn, process and surface insights with explanations. Operational experts can review and interact with these alerts, to identify corrective actions before an event occurs. Learn more about how you can get to value in a matter of days.
Complete package: Clue on Azure is an all-in-one offering that includes connectivity, processing, storage, database and visualization. Falkonry Clue leverages Azure IoT services such as Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub, and Azure Data Lake Storage for connectivity, monitoring and control, while our secure web app delivers intuitive visualizations without the need to invest in custom development.
Enterprise-ready global scale: Clue on Azure allows you to replicate deployment across more production lines without further architecture development work. This is because Clue is built to accommodate more data sources and bigger data throughputs, and leveraging the cloud gives it the necessary access to larger data volumes via replication. The Falkonry-Azure connectivity design ensures that once the setup is done, it scales automatically as the data volume increases.
Operationalize your data now
With its wide array of services, Azure IoT has gained significant expertise in ingesting and storing manufacturing data. Azure’s various cloud-based offerings even extend further down the analytics pipeline, however, to gain actionable insights from your data, choosing the right components from the reference architecture, becomes a complicated proposition for most organizations. Falkonry’s AI platform on Azure eases this complexity by making use of the right components, automating installation and gluing them together to achieve your desired end goal – applying advanced analytics to get actionable insights from your operational data. If your organization is already on Azure or you’d like to learn more about getting started from scratch, contact us now.
