Best practices for setting up a monitoring system with Industrial Edge¶

With Siemens Industrial Edge, the built-in Logging & Monitoring feature simplifies and standardizes the configuration of data collection by leveraging Fluent Bit. This enables log and metric aggregation from Industrial Edge Devices (IEDs).

Key concepts¶

Logging & Monitoring wraps Fluent Bit to:

Collect system and application logs.
Capture key metrics from Industrial Edge devices and workloads.
Forward these to configured destinations via supported protocols (e.g., HTTP, InfluxDB, etc.).

Purpose:

Provide visibility into device health and application performance.
Enable troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
Support predictive and condition-based maintenance strategies.

Architecture recommendations¶

Use local data sinks per logical unit (recommendation)¶

Deploy a local monitoring/aggregation system per factory site or logical unit.

Benefits:

Resilience: Monitoring remains functional even when central systems are unavailable.
Performance: Reduces bandwidth usage by processing and aggregating data locally.
Autonomy: Site engineers and technicians can work independently with local dashboards.

Use centralized monitoring¶

Single Central System is suitable when:

The factory units are very small.
Global insights and consolidated analytics are required.
Latency and bandwidth are not critical constraints.

Hybrid Approach:

Use a tiered architecture: local sinks forward aggregated data to a global monitoring platform for enterprise-wide visibility.

Typical data flow¶

flowchart BT
    subgraph "Edge Device"
        A["Industrial Edge Runtime"]
        F["Industrial Edge App"]
        B["Logging & Monitoring"]
    end

    subgraph "Site/Unit Monitoring"
        C["Local Data Sink or Aggregator"]
        D["Site Dashboards & Alerting"]
    end

    subgraph "Central Monitoring"
        E["Global Monitoring System"]
    end

    C -->|Optional Forwarding| E
    A --> B
    B --> C
    C --> D
    F --> B