Flows Manager
The Flows Manager module allows you to connect to your devices and configure the output so you can better visualize how the device is operating. The connection to your device can be both incoming and outgoing, allowing you to affect the device. For example, you can start and stop a device from a flow, write to a topic, or trigger events.
Note: The Flows are based on Node-RED, which is a visual programming tool. It displays relations and functions visually, and allows you to program without having to type in code. Node-RED allows you to create JavaScript functions.
Flows and subflows consist of separate canvases located in tabs within the Flow view, which you can use to perform operations that are useful when processing collected data.
Flows allow you to:
- Collect data from devices in DeviceHub, databases, enterprises systems, and various file types.
- Process, filter, and analyze data while implementing JavaScript logic, adding functions, and including rules and alerts for event processing.
- Create flow templates and deploy them to multiple edge devices using Manufacturing Connect.
- Start, stop, and delete multiple flows (up to four).
- Update the memory limit, upload custom node modules, download a flow.json file, and download the logs for a flow.
- Add new flows up to the maximum allowed memory.
- Include flows in backup/restore and template.
- Set up a dashboard to organize and better visualize your flows.
- For Manufacturing Connect Edge version 3.5.6 and earlier, flow logs have no maximum size. You will need to manually manage/delete these files as needed.
- For Manufacturing Connect Edge version 3.10.0 and later, flow logs have a maximum size of 80 MB, rotated between two log files of 40 MB each.
To access the Flows Manager:
- Log in to Manufacturing Connect Edge.
From the Navigation panel, select Flows Manager. The Overview pane appears.
Flows Manager pane