- [Neel] Hello builders, welcome back. Earlier, you learned how to collect data from different industrial data sources on the edge using Greengrass equipped industrial gateways. In this video, I will explain how you can take advantage of processing those data on the cloud, and why it's important. I'll also introduce you to another edge software. Fun, right? So, think of this scenario. You have solved one of the problems for your cupcake unit in one of your factories. And now, your CTO is super happy, and would like you to scale this functionality to multiple other sites globally. So essentially, you need to perform condition monitoring and predictive maintenance to improve the efficiency of equipments across multiple sites. So tell me, how do you solve this problem? Raise your hand if you think you can build multiple local dashboards for different production lines and factory sites, and have the respective operations team communicate on equipment status in some way, like through emails, or maybe use their current on-prem IT systems, which have a lengthy refresh cycle. If you did raise your hand, I like your optimism. But that's a lot of overhead, my friend, or not a scalable mechanism. This is where the cloud services can be savior, as cloud can provide you the economies of scale, along with advanced capabilities to manage operations efficiently. So you must be thinking, hey Neel, enough storytelling, let's get real. Okay, so the AWS service built for industrial-scale operations is-- drumrolls again-- (drumroll) AWS IoT SiteWise. SiteWise is a managed service that helps to understand and improve processes in a single industrial site, or across multiple facilities. With SiteWise, industrial engineers can group sensor data streams by production line, and group production lines into facilities. Plant managers or business analysts in the corporate headquarter can then easily query sensor data across all facilities, and track various business KPIs. SiteWise even allows you to import the existing hierarchy of assets in the factory so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. And thereafter, an engineer or technician can understand the condition of each production line in a factory--or multiple--remotely, and dispatch the right resources to fix an issue much faster. This leaves the engineers more time to focus on their core job of understanding and designing better systems, instead of coordinating operational issues in the field. Similar to Greengrass, SiteWise also has two components. One, edge software builds on top of Greengrass and is referred to as SiteWise Edge. That makes it easy to collect, organize, process, and monitor equipment data on premises. And two, its cloud counterpart, IoT SiteWise, a service that enables industrial enterprises to model, collect, store, organize, and visualize thousands of sensor data streams across multiple industrial facilities. In addition, since SiteWise supports OPC-UA protocol natively, there is no need for translating the tags or asset hierarchy into a different format. You can create virtual representations of your industrial equipment or processes using assets in AWS IoT SiteWise. Thus, it helps industrial engineers to skip months of efforts in developing undifferentiated data collection and cataloging solutions. Instead, you can focus on building intelligence on top of your data to detect and fix equipment issues, spot inefficiencies, and improve production output. A common question is, how SiteWise Edge is different from Greengrass software? Great questions. Stay with me. SiteWise Edge is actually built on top of Greengrass, and expands on the hardware support from third-party industrial gateways and computers to other AWS services, such as AWS Outposts, or AWS Snow Family computer devices. SiteWise Edge can also retain data locally for up to 30 days if the hardware resources permit, which can be crucial for your factory. This is often easier for industrial customers to get started with a packaged gateway solution, over starting from the scratch with Greengrass gateway, and configuring industry-specific capabilities such as with OPC-UA Modbus, et cetera. Remember, Greengrass is a software that can be used across different industry segments-- just automotive, consumer, healthcare, et cetera-- beyond manufacturing and factories, as well. SiteWise also offers the same APIs and mechanisms to manage asset models for edge and cloud. This helps engineers, like you, to quickly compute metrics-- such as overall equipment effectiveness, or OEE; mean time between failures, or MTBF; mean time to resolution, or MTTR-- from equipment state, quality count, and throughput data, with or without cloud connectivity. (breathes in and exhales) That's a mouthful. (laughs) But wait, I'm not done yet. We're almost there. SiteWise provides ability to create a no-code-- I repeat--a no-code, fully managed web applications, using SiteWise Monitor for visualizing and interacting with operational data from industrial devices and equipment. You can view the asset data in near real time. You can even visualize computer data using statistical aggregates-- such as average, sum, and count, and more-- over a set of time intervals. This auto-computed aggregates are stored in a time series data store, can be exported to a data lake, such as Amazon S3, and can be queried by your custom applications, too. How awesome is that? There is one last thing. If your organization is using a popular third-party visualization tool, such as Grafana, SiteWise also supports that. You can retain your existing investment, and just hook those dashboards to Grafana. So now, let's recall our scenario again, with either Greengrass gateways or SiteWise Edge enabled hardwares. You can collect, process, visualize operational data from different equipments, and take intelligent actions locally on the plant floors. And with cloud connectivity, all these gateways can connect to their cloud counterpart, which is? You know it, IoT SiteWise service. Thus, the cloud gives you a single-pane-of-glass view for managing and monitoring all your production lines and facilities spread across multiple regions. This economy of scale helps you focus on the business operations, and let AWS handle the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing the underlying infrastructure for processing hundreds of thousands of millions of data points streamed from your industrial equipment. That's incredible, right? Who knew you can identify defective equipment from multiple sites across the globe in near real time? Hope by now you understand the value of SiteWise in theory, and you will learn a lot more as it will get hands-on in the upcoming exercises.
