German company wetcon, with many years of expertise in device management solutions based on FDT and FDI, offers with fielddevice.cloud a cloud-based asset management for field devices as Software as a Service (SaaS). Thanks to a plug-in for PACTware, provided free of charge, this is available to all DTMs, hosted in PACTware, without them having to be modified.
The fielddevice.cloud web application provides statistical overview of configured device types, their geographic location information, editing users, NE107 status of devices, executed parameter up- and downloads, occurred error messages and parameter related audit trail information. This information can also be displayed for a dedicated device instance.
Within PACTware no additional user handling is necessary to provide this information to fielddevice.cloud. Instead, the plug-in takes over the logging of all activities and delivers the data to the field device service via a secure connection for the respective customer account. This works with all DTMs without any modification purely on the basis of the information provided via the FDT interfaces of a DTM.
The reports are highly interactive and based on Power BI from Microsoft. Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools, that delivers insights throughout an organization and is able to connect to a hundred of different data sources. Power BI based reports are highly interactive supporting any HTML5 based web browser. In addition, the reports can be modified directly by the fielddevice.cloud user within the web browser using an Excel oriented user interface. This can be used to provide additional information within a report, e. g. based on specific field device types.
The service is hosted in Microsoft Azure. This guarantees highest service availability and worldwide fast access times.
Within fielddevice.cloud, data of each customer is stored in separate databases, in fact fielddevice.cloud uses a dedicated SQL server in the cloud for each customer. A customer may also be able to access its monitored data using an ODATA service interface (on request).
Field device monitoring services may also be available for any other type of device or FDT/FRAME application. Source code for nearly any client can be generated automatically based on the OPENAPI interface of fielddevice.cloud REST services.
Usage of fielddevice.cloud is free of charge for 30 days. After that, payment is based on the number of connected field devices per day.
wetcon also offers a version via Microsoft Azure Marketplace, so that the fielddevice.cloud services and reports can be hosted within a customer owned Azure subscription. This would provide also the possibility to integrate other customer specific databases (e. g. production data and buyer information) into the Power BI reports.
For the connection of further field devices to fielddevice.cloud, wetcon offers appropriate support or realizes such an integration efficiently.
Article contributed Mathias Hartner, wetcon
Additional information:
wetcon GmbH, 89250 Senden, Germany
www.wetcon.net www.fielddevice.cloud