IoT SiteWise is a fully managed service in AWS, which automates the processing of data from the plant floor, the structuring and marking of data, and generation of real-time metrics to monitor. The service provides customers with a way to connect their on-premise industrial equipment via a gateway to link their on-premises servers to the AWS cloud, where the data accumulates for analysis.
Amazon introduced AWS IoT SiteWise as a preview at re: Invent 2018 and added a few new features, including SiteWise Monitor, a year later during re: Invent 2019. The public cloud provider has now announced the general availability of the service.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/iot-sitewise/
With SiteWise, customers can model their manufacturing machinery, processes, and services by adding context to the collected data. Subsequently, they can use the built-in library of mathematical and statistical operators to define standard industrial performance metrics such as Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of their production plant. Once, the customer environment model is in place, and their data went through processing in AWS, the service automatically computes the metrics at an interval defined by the customer. Both data and metrics reside in a time-series database designed to store and retrieve time-stamped data with low latency. And finally:
- From the SiteWise console, customers can create custom web apps without coding to visualize KPIs across end-user devices
- SiteWise provides interfaces for collecting data from modern industrial applications through MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) messages or its Application Programming Interface (APIs)
In an Amazon press release on AWS IoT SiteWise, Dirk Didascalou, vice president of IoT, AWS stated:
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.
Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told InfoQ:
IoT is one of the critical next-generation application use cases that requires enterprises to build them in-house, as the demands and requirements diversity is beyond what standard software can achieve. But that does not mean that components and platforms are a great benefit for the teams building IoT Apps. One example of helping these teams is AWS IoT SiteWise which helps on the critical data management aspect of IoT apps. This allows developers to focus on functionality and less on the 'plumbing', thus increasing developer velocity.
Currently, AWS SiteWise is available in regions of US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland) – and customers only pay what they use with no minimum fees or mandatory service usage. Note that they are billed separately for the usage of messaging, data storage, data processing, and SiteWise Monitor. More details on AWS IoT SiteWise pricing are available on the pricing page. Furthermore, according to a blog on the GA of AWS IoT SiteWise, customers can learn more through a tutorial, and the developer guide.
