Graphite- sending metrics from injection moulding machines

Question

I love grafana and metrics. I was to get metrics from big mechanical devices. Example plastic injection moulding machines. They have Plc devices. Anyone have any idea on how I would start this off?

Thanks

Trev

Answer 1

If there is a way to get the metrics out of the PLC devices, then the simplest way to get started will be to write a small script that gathers the information you're interested in and feeds it into a Time Series Database like Graphite or InfluxDB.

This can be as simple as a script run via cron, in whatever language you're most comfortable with.

Once you have your measurements getting fed into the TSDB, then you can use Grafana to graph them over time.

Here's a really simple example I wrote to pull stats from a HomeGenie home automation system and push them into Graphite: https://gist.github.com/DanCech/348d37ee45898b34abd3