On this episode of The New Stack Makers, TNS Founder & EiC Alex Williams sits down with Jeroen Coussement, Co-founder & CEO, Factry to focus on the use of OPC-UA and InfluxDB in industrial settings. Coussement built an open-source OPC-UA server to bring data from and to process control systems as well as demonstrate the value of a time series database by collecting data from industrial control systems, adding further context with additional data (and interpreting the result visually), using this as a basis for optimization.

When working in an industrial IoT context, there are many concerns that one has to keep in mind throughout the software development process. When Coussement built the OPC-UA server and the Node OPC-UA Logger, he emphasised 'flattening out' the schema when building the server, and made Node the language of choice when developing the logger. "You just configure it and it will log the data from your process to InfluxDB. That's basically it in a nutshell. It also provides buffering, because typically you don't want any data loss, so you install that collector on one of your automation servers, where it's as close to the source as possible. There, it will start collecting the data and if there's some kind of network issue, it will buffer the data so when the network comes back online, it will send over the data it has been collecting in the meantime," said Coussement.