Holistic monitoring for industrial IT is a topic that we have covered on this blog many times before. We even put together a white paper about it. Essentially, holistic monitoring incorporates elements from IT and OT into one tool. One of the greatest advantages of this approach is that you can develop dashboards that deliver an overview of your entire industrial IT infrastructure. To demonstrate this, I will be writing a series of blog posts examining specific examples of dashboards for industrial environments that were created with Paessler PRTG monitoring software.
PRTG offers the capability to not only monitor IT devices, systems, and applications, but also OT elements. Because it "understands" common standards and protocols like OPC UA, MQTT, and Modbus TCP, PRTG can be used to monitor a wide range of industrial IT devices and systems. Additionally, functionality for getting data from IIoT devices means that you can get a comprehensive overview of many aspects of your industrial IT.
But what exactly could an overview look like? Here is an example. Click on the image to see an expanded view, and continue reading below for an explanation of what's in the dashboard.
As you can see, the dashboard shown here gives a broad overview of aspects such as metrics to do with production, IT metrics, and metrics to do with the building itself. It's easy to see at a glance if something, somewhere is in a failed or warning state.
Before we look at the sample overview in more detail, here's a brief explanation of how it works: with PRTG, you can assign sensors (or data collectors) to gather data from devices, systems, and more. PRTG offers the functionality to create dashboards (known as "Maps" in PRTG) to represent the data gathered by the sensors.
Now let's break the overview down, section by section,.
In the production environment section, there is an overview of some vital metrics from the OT area.
In just this production view, engineers already have a summary of some of the most vital aspects of their OT area.
The IT Environment section provides an overview of the IT environment (as the title suggests).
One of the most beloved aspects of PRTG dashboards is the sunburst view. It's a great way of showing the status of all devices of a specific type. For example: in this view, the categories are listed closest to the inner ring, and the related sensors are shown moving outwards. At a glance, we can see that there are some warnings (yellow color) to with IoT devices.
The bottom left traffic lights are shown by the Business Process sensor in PRTG. This sensor gives you an overview of the overall status of a specific service. It is provided with data from sensors that are monitoring devices and systems related to that service or process. Let's take Email as an example. There are several sensors monitoring different components that provide the Email service, such as the Email server and the storage devices used by the Email service. On this main dashboard, we only see the overall status for the Email service. In our example, everything related to the Email service is up and running. However, if the Email storage device would run out of space, as an example, then the traffic light on this dashboard would change to either yellow or red, depending on the severity.
The dashboard also shows several other IT-related metrics, such as the status of the virtual environment, corporate Website, and cloud services. You can also see bandwidth usage on the WAN over a period of time.
For more on the IT monitoring capabilities of PRTG, take a look here.
The dashboard also shows us various metrics from the building facilities.
Each of these views – the production view, the IT view, and the building technology view – could be separate dashboards, used by the relevant teams. But the real benefit is having all of these views on one dashboard, side-by-side. This makes it possible to keep an eye on the health of the entire IT and OT infrastructure.
And this is just one example of what PRTG can do with dashboards. For more the sensors and capabilities of PRTG, take a look at our industrial IT monitoring page. And if you'd like to learn about supporting IT and OT convergence with holistic monitoring, then download our white paper.
Do you have comments or questions about using PRTG in an industrial environment? Let us know in the comments below!