According to McKinsey Digital, a new device connects to the internet every 127 seconds. And by the end of 2022, the world had over 18 billion active Internet of Things (IoT) devices, reports Ericsson.
Yet, the ‘IoT’ buzzword belongs in the past, as today, we can call it ‘business as usual’. Monitoring machines, infrastructure and their processes are now as important as being connected. For decades, devices in manufacturing, aeronautics, and a select group of industries have used sensors to monitor performance. As modern digitisation took hold, this capability expanded to include everyone.
IoT is already everywhere
Consider how connected we are today. Consumers track their vehicles for safety and insurance perks. Farmers fine-tune their crops with environmental sensors. Security teams scrutinise data from servers and networks. Building managers oversee properties with site data. Supply chains track goods. Utilities monitor consumption. Commuters check where their taxi or bus is. You can even pop an Apple Airtag in your child’s pocket and track their whereabouts.
“Just look at the devices we can purchase for our homes,” says Simon Ric – Hansen, Senior Solutions Architect and Data analyst at Digital Resilience Insight (DRI). “Everything is smart now and generates data. Many businesses have devices with sensors in them. With connectivity, you can get data out of them as well.”
Impressive? Yes. Practical? Not so much. Even though these sensors feed insightful data to decision-makers, it’s a mess of conflicting silos and protocols—often locking clients into certain software brands and monitoring tools. Data standards are all over the place. And integrating the feeds from different devices is sometimes so complex it’s not worth the investment.
Yet, we’ve established that practically every organisation has access to sensors. The IoT ecosystem is potent, but its ability to deliver consistent value is weak. Companies end up with isolated pockets of machine performance data.
Meet the Splunk Edge Hub
The market needs a unifying IoT ecosystem: the Splunk Edge Hub.
Splunk is a respected software platform for searching, monitoring, and analysing machine-generated data. But Splunk’s innovators knew they could do so much more if they could simplify device integration and collection.
Splunk Edge Hub is the answer. Splunk’s first hardware device, this small box connects with the broadest range of IoT protocols to collect data from multiple independent devices. Ultimately, providing discrete data streams that feed into nuanced dashboards.
How nuanced? Consider a manufacturer with two very different assembly lines with different cadences and supply requirements. Typically, these lines must be managed separately, even at the planning and provisioning levels. But the Splunk Edge Hub feeds their unique data into the Splunk platform, where stakeholders can create separate, overlapping, and combined insights.
It also doubles as an IoT device, with onboard sensors that capture temperature, humidity, light, and sound metrics. It adds insights where you don’t have sensors and relates what other IoT devices tell you through coherent, real-time feedback.
Your Data, Ready and Integrated
The Splunk Edge Hub overcomes a significant challenge for IoT investments. It removes the issues that result in IoT information silos, integrating with a wide range of protocols (MQTT, OPC UA, ModBUS, SNMP, etc., with more in development). It unifies machine data streams and feeds them into the award-winning Splunk data platform, where you can create dashboards, generate reports, and search for answers from the data.
“A lot of companies have various devices that create information, but they are often completely separate,” says Hansen. “This segment of devices cannot talk to that segment of devices. Companies have one monitoring tool for one device, but a different one for another. There’s never an overview of all of the data. Bringing it all together used to be very challenging until the Splunk Edge Hub arrived.”
Splunk provides centralised data management, real-time analytics, data visualisation, advanced analytics, customisable workflows, scalability, compliance, security features, and operational insights. The Splunk Edge Hub brings all your IoT devices along.
DRI is a leading Splunk partner. We deliver and support data analytics and management solutions to our clients, furnishing the skills and knowledge that help them get real value from their machine data. We are taking that further with the Splunk Edge Hub, integrating even more client devices into a single truth of information that they can manage and manipulate to match their business priorities.
The Internet of Things is now so pervasive that it’s business as usual. No organisation can go far if it doesn’t get consistent and coherent strategic value from machine monitoring data. In the past, that was difficult to achieve. But no more: with DRI, Splunk and the transformational Splunk Edge Hub, you can unify and harness your machine data for new efficiencies and profitable products and services.