Altair IoT Studio Capabilities

Backend for Smart Connected Ecosystems

AnythingDB

Altair IoT Studio AnythingDB allows our users to create a digital model of the assets that define smart connected ecosystems.

AnythingDB is a specially designed, flexible, secure database to help you capture and access metadata for devices, processes, users, tasks, or any other entity which is considered in your project.

With AnythingDB, you can:
  • Create schemas and relationships in a single category as it uses Json to define entities
  • Validate data easily as it handles intuitive entity definition standard and is flexible when modeling new things
  • Access exactly the data you want as it automatically generates REST endpoints and MQTT topics for entities and their properties
  • Easily access data and determine what data should be on request, and what data should be pushed immediately
  • Provide fine-grained access control over your entities, so only the right users get access to privileged information
AnythingDB also:
  • Is ACID compliant, multi-tenant, and autoscaling
  • Provides automatic backups to ensure no data is lost
  • Provides contextual information to connect with telemetry analytics and AI Models
  • Handles the communication with the device using actions, and stores events logs

Functions

Altair IoT Studio Functions allows developers to execute custom business rules by writing code in the most popular languages, and automatically deploying the code without provisioning servers, or building an API, or maintaining the infrastructure. It makes the process of establishing the logic easy. With Functions, you can:
  • Implement business logic such as predicting future values, scheduling analysis and notifications, and including algorithms for identifying image content
  • Incorporate simulation models using FMUs (functional mockup units) to build digital twins or compare simulated results with actual results
  • Access your functions automatically through your API
  • Create custom business rules and execute code based on various triggers – from HTTP requests, devices, database, or platform events. Functions invocation can also be scheduled
  • Automatically scale and optimize the infrastructure

Access Control

Altair IoT Studio Access Control is the management mechanism to set authorization rules for every part of your smart connected ecosystem.

With these tools, you can create roles, assign specific permissions to identified users, control external access to the application, and provision security keys.

For better security, proof of authentication and authorization is needed throughout the Altair IoT Studio platform. It leverages access token as the proof for the request. The token lifecycle in the Altair IoT Studio platform is based on OAuth2.

With Access Control you can now:

  • Have an overview of the users who have access to your environment - either through the Altair IoT Studio Studio interface or through an end user application.
  • Invite your colleagues by providing controlled access to collaborate for faster development.
  • Define either generalized or fine-grained access control policies limiting users to specific information from your smart product ecosystem.
  • Offer role-based access control by defining the roles with their associated group of policies and assign it to your devices and applications.
  • Link Altair IoT Studio to external sources of information, and use scopes to limit their capacity.

Object Storage

Altair IoT Object Storage provides a powerful and versatile way to store, manage and retrieve efficiently various data types, including text, images, documents, and more, within the platform. It enables you to organize the data by creating folders and uploading the objects, which can be accessed through an URL, giving you the power to integrate it as a file system inside the IoT ecosystem.

Management Tools

Each project is hosted on a different space inside Altair IoT Studio. Spaces are isolated areas for you to build your smart product application. Entities in Altair IoT Studio cannot be seen from one Space to another.

To ease the process of developing your smart product ecosystem, the platform offers the following tools:
  • Label entities: enables you to categorize entities into customer defined tags for a fast comprehension of your digital model. Labels have MQTT credentials, giving them the ability to accomplish a wide range of tasks
  • API Inspector: enables new users to get familiar with and interact with the Altair IoT Studio API structure. Requests can be made through the API Inspector without having to worry about authentication details, as this information is automatically populated
  • MQTT inspector: allows you to see MQTT incoming topics and messages and the format of the data payload. A list of the messages and topics is shown so you will know what topics are available
  • Space settings: provides an interface to manage general settings of your space and manage secrets storage. See Free Trial Limits.

Edge Computing for Enabling Data Processing and Analysis at the Edge

EdgeOps

Altair IoT Studio EdgeOps provides a set of tools for building, maintaining and continuously improving code in resource constrained devices at the edge of smart connected ecosystems. Edge devices allow a physical device in industrial ecosystems to connect to an IoT platform and establish a connection where the physical device can send data to the platform and receive data from the platform. The edge device will be the intermediate piece to enable communication with the platform of devices using industrial protocols (OPC-UA, Modbus, CANbus, etc). They are also needed when the user wants to rely on some operations at the edge to reduce latency and ease the operations.

EdgeOps comprises of an edge-optimized platform to accelerate edge development, and brings modern web development methodology to the edge, with a capability to massively scale the applications there. With EdgeOps you can:
  • Create an edge cluster by installing atop an existing OS or by generating an installer image for bare metal install
  • Assemble, deploy, monitor, and continuously improve applications at the edge using a management console
  • Interact with all the clusters in the ecosystem
  • Create or update Kubernetes resources at edge using the resource catalog
  • Build configurations from the resources created previously to deploy different services on edge
  • Monitor cluster metrics, such as CPU and memory
  • Directly access the cluster’s API interface through the API client
  • Support Edge-to-cloud sync with Thing MQTT connection setup in a single API call

Edge Compute Platform

Altair IoT Studio Edge Compute Platform is an open-architecture platform for the edge. It consists of a collection of micro-services designed to run on low resource boards (like a Raspberry Pi or Intel NUC) as well as scaling up to industrial gateways. The services are containerized (docker) for deployment on K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes built for IoT and Edge Computing. The Edge Compute Platform extends a lot of value:
  • Provides numerous (flexible) deployment possibilities by adding other services in addition to the ones needed to run the Edge Compute Platform
  • Management and orchestration can be done from the cloud using Altair IoT Studio
  • Inter-service communication is message based (AMPQ - Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) allowing scaling and separation of services (they can run “anywhere”)
  • Cloud connectivity for configuration and management is not needed since all can be done through the local API; for remote deployment (firewalled) the cloud service can connect to an MQTT broker and expose the API
  • Device connectivity is done through “device driver services” with services written for various protocols; the device drivers are considered external to the core services and interact with the Edge Compute Platform using an API
  • Plug-in or “support services” - third party services - can interact with the rest of the system using the API and can subscribe to telemetry data, perform calculations and publish the results as telemetry
  • Additional device drivers or plugin services can be written by anyone and in any language.
  • Atomic over-the-air updates with rollback supported through the active/inactive partition install on bare metal. A downloadable installer image can be created in Altair IoT Studio.

Marketplace

Altair IoT Studio Marketplace provides the users with predefined sets of applications for the Edge. Thanks to it, users can conveniently browse, discover, and import the Edge application to their own project space to build and manage the Edge solution at scale in a few clicks.

When a new version is added to an application listed in the Marketplace, it automatically becomes available as an update to the imported Edge Application.

Altair IoT Studio Marketplace contains applications that run on the Edge, starting from pre-defined sets of applications built by our engineers, third-party applications to any other container-based applications you want to install at the Edge can be defined in the Marketplace.

Frontend for Smart Connected Ecosystems

Altair Product Integrations

Altair® Panopticon™ technology provides the functionality and the ability to connect to a wide range of streaming data sources, time series databases and regular databases, both on-premises and in the cloud, and display data with interactive information visualization. It empowers users to take control of their data and quickly turn it into actionable information. Updates to data are handled with incredible efficiency.

Stream Processing (Panopticon)

Panopticon stream processing provides a method for tracking and analyzing streams of information leading to useful structured conclusions out of that raw information using as little code as you want.
  • Use applications to transform and join data streams, add calculated columns, execute artificial intelligence models, convert values, and connect to dozens of diverse sources or destinations in real-time
  • Describe how data should be piped, transformed, and processed using a set of inputs, operators, and outputs by designing a directed graph in a graphic user interface
  • Create data sources to be used as inputs or outputs in the application mode
  • Define global parameters to set a value across the whole Altair IoT Studio platform

Real Time Visualization (Panopticon)

With Panopticon you can create dashboards that can show data from all your smart products in real time, and where dashboard graphics update continuously with the incoming sensor data.

You can now easily build an application for your users quickly, and with no code, and:
  • Supporting a wide range of information visualizations, including our well-known Treemaps, Heat Maps, Scatter Plots, Horizon Graphs, and a wide range of other great visualizations designed for fast comprehension and easy interpretation of static, time series, real-time streaming, and historic data sets
  • Creating data tables, apply filters and define actions to process all your data
  • Allowing monitoring many potential elements simultaneously
  • Sharing your workbook with others and define permissions for each user