Resources

Manufacturing Connect FAQs

11min

No, Manufacturing Connect is based on the model purchased from Litmus. Manufacturing Connect is the management suite for Manufacturing Connect Edge.

These attributes are sent by the devices. If it does not display:

  • Try double-checking your connection parameters.
  • If the parameters are correct, check your firewall settings.

Data sent to Manufacturing Connect must be in a special format, as shown in the JSON schema in the General Settings page. If Manufacturing Connect cannot parse incoming messages, the messages only appear in the Raw tab.

Manufacturing Connect offers the Remote UI feature. See Open Edge Devices.

Manufacturing Connect supports MQTT protocol to remotely manage a device:

MQTT

Manufacturing Connect supports 3 types of MQTT topics:

  • request - to send manage requests to a device
  • response - to receive responses from a device
  • data - to receive data from a device

Request/response formats are not defined.

For example: If you can program your device to reboot when it receives {"command": "reboot"} from the request topic, you can reboot your device remotely.

If you open the MQTT tab on the Device Details form, you can see Request/Response tabs to manage MQTT devices online.

To accomplish management tasks, you must program your device.

The Batch Device Management feature offers operations similar to those described above, but you can define batch commands (MQTT) and schedule these commands to execute against a group of devices.

Use Manufacturing Connect Edge. All data that appears in the Explore tab is available in Manufacturing Connect Edge as well.

  • We do security testing with every release.
  • We prevent security issues through REST and MQTT protocols. They only use secure transports, such as TLS and DTLS. We do not support unencrypted transport between the two products.
  • All security credentials established during cloud activation are securely stored on the Manufacturing Connect Edge device and not exposed to the end user. It is impossible to alter these credentials after activation as long as physical security of the Manufacturing Connect Edge gateway is maintained.
  • Alert - The Manufacturing Connect Alerts feature allows users to define notifications based on rules. Rules comprise a set of conditions that define an abnormal state of a device. For example: No data received from a device in more than two minutes, or the temperature went below 30 degrees. First, define Actions. Actions are the types of notifications, such as Slack or WebHook. Then, create a Trigger. A trigger combines device tags, a set of rules, and an action. Once triggered, Manufacturing Connect sends the alert notification to the defined destination. Alert messages can be viewed on the Manufacturing Connect dashboard and from email and third-party web applications, such as Slack. The Incidents tab on the projects page lists the alerts that were generated.
  • Event - Events list the Manufacturing Connect configuration activities that occurred for a project within a company. For example: Added a new project, or deployed a new device.
  • Incident - If a device reaches an abnormal state according to the rules,  Manufacturing Connect will create a new incident and send notifications. The Incidents tab lists the alerts that were generated. When a device returns to a normal state, the open incident will be closed, and Manufacturing Connect will send another notification with a message about the incident being resolved.

The number of edge devices is not limited, provided you have allocated the appropriate resources. The billing is based on tags in use.

We strongly recommend ESXi version 6.7 or higher.

Find out the following:

  • The version of the Manufacturing Connect Edge and the Manufacturing Connect.
  • The version of a component if it is not working.
  • The type of license installed.
  • If the network is properly configured.
  • If the NTP/DNS settings are correct.
  • If you are using the correct PLC driver and IP address.

Alert history is not deleted. It is kept as long as there is space in the database.

After the alert history database becomes full, the system stops accepting data. In upcoming releases, we will develop a more sophisticated data life cycle management.

Not at this time. In upcoming releases, Manufacturing Connect will be able to deploy LDAP/AD settings for various Manufacturing Connect Edge devices.

Currently, a template consists of: device configurations (settings and tags), analytics, flows, and connectors.

You can select a mix of both types and create as many templates as you want.

These templates can be uploaded from the Manufacturing Connect Admin Console or from the Manufacturing Connect.

You can create different groups of Manufacturing Connect Edge devices and select which template you want to deploy to a selected group of devices.

In upcoming releases, we will include CC as well as a few other configurations.

  • Manufacturing Connect supports the MySQL protocol for ClickHouse. If the BI tool supports MySQL, it can connect to ClickHouse. Some smart BI tools may use MySQL system tables that are not present in ClickHouse, so they should be tested.
  • Manufacturing Connect allows you to connect to the ClickHouse underlying database. See https://clickhouse.tech/docs/en/interfaces/third-party/integrations/ to find the native connectors that ClickHouse uses.

When an activation fails, there will be an Activation Stage Message that reports the exact cause(s). Here are some potential fixes:

  • Ensure port 443 is opened.
  • Ensure 51820/UDP is open for the Manufacturing Connect Edge instance.
  • Ensure the Remote Access protocol is not blocked at all.
  • Ensure the time synchronization setting between the Manufacturing Connect and Manufacturing Connect Edge is working properly.
  • For Docker-run Manufacturing Connect Edge instances, check for NETADM capability.

Yes, deleting or deactivating a Manufacturing Connect Edge instance does remove the services account that was created during Manufacturing Connect Edge activation.

You can check under General Settings > PubSub Settings in Manufacturing Connect. This shows a list of Manufacturing Connect Edge instances using PubSub. The service account name looks like edge-<MC device ID>@project. The first five characters of the device ID appear in the UI, but the link contains the full ID.

No, Manufacturing Connect does not delete service accounts automatically. However, some users have noticed fewer unused accounts after cleanup. It’s a good idea to remove unused accounts, especially in test/demo environments, since Google Cloud limits the number of service accounts to 100 per project.

You can request a limit increase from Google Cloud support. Another option is the Workload Identity Federation, which removes the limit on the number of Pub/Sub connectors and allows secure access without needing many service accounts.