As is well known, a gateway can establish the connection between industrial machines, control units or individual sections of production lines and classic IT networks. In doing so, they enable communication between systems that are not necessarily compatible with each other and can thus also integrate Operational Technology (OT) data into an IT monitoring concept. Due to increasing digitalization, this aspect is becoming more and more interesting for many companies.
One way of bringing the IT and OT world together is to use intelligent gateways from the manufacturer Advantech. The following diagram shows a possible integration of these gateways:
By using V3 Advantech gateways, all based on an implementation of Node-RED, OT devices can be configured for communication with an existing IT infrastructure and as a result can also be integrated into PRTG for monitoring. Node-RED is particularly suited to developing data collection and processing logic, and makes data processing functions more user-friendly. What is probably less well known is that Advantech developed the first Node-RED fieldbus gateways several years ago and is still producing them.
Using the Node-RED graphical and browser-based drag-and-drop flow editor integrated into the Advantech gateways, you can easily connect hardware devices and various IoT services.
These gateways can be integrated in PRTG by using the MQTT Subscribe Custom sensor. This sensor can be used to subscribe to a specific topic and then display the received data in a dashboard. All information about this can be found in the manual or also in this video:
Monitor Advantech gateways
To enable gateway monitoring with PRTG, two basic steps are required:
The prerequisite for this is a completed basic configuration of your gateway. A complete explanation of how to integrate Advantech data into PRTG can be downloaded here for free:
Do you have questions about integrating Advantech data into PRTG or about our MQTT sensors? Just leave us a comment!