Whether or not we're truly in the fourth industrial revolution, one thing is for sure: the amount of

data generated by industrial machines will continue to soar. Today, a typical smart industrial
machine can generate around 5 gigabytes of data per week. It makes sense - pretty much every
one of these machines is produced with the capability to capture its sensor data,
performance logs, equipment behaviour, process conditions, operator actions, security
vulnerabilities and its embedded application software behaviour among many other things.

The challenge, however, is that the format of data from the sources that I've just outlined above
is so unpredictable that it would be extremely difficult to be able to process and analyse the data
using traditional methods such as relational databases.

As it turns out, there are plenty of tools that could help you extract valuable insights from such
kind of data. Big Data tools. But yet, as I mentioned in a previous article, most big data
technologies have their origins in search engine technology. They were never build with
industrial machines in mind. On the other hand, existing systems that collect data streams from
industrial machines such as SCADA and historians cannot be easily integrated within big data
pipeline.

This leads us to a discussion of two technologies that can simplify and enhance an organization’s
ability to gain value and analytics insights from data residing in industrial machines. OPC UA
and Splunk.

Why OPC UA?

You see, applying machine learning algorithms to extract value from data involves preparing the
data in the most part. Simply stated, about 80% of a typical analytics project is spent on
preparing the data to get the best results possible. So it would be beneficial to have data that is
clean and well structured. OPC UA gives you that advantage in the form of its information
modelling capability. Of course, the whole idea of Big Data is to be able to ingest data in kind of
format but it would serve you best use an OPC UA information which also provides meta-data
that can help you do root cause analysis once your machine learning model has revealed an
anomaly.
Further, an industrial machine manufacturer can implement OPC UA's pub-sub specification to
prevent polling of data points such as is the case when monitoring a machine's ON/OFF status.
This enables updating of the big data analytics platform only by exception as opposed to
collection of worthless data, thereby leading to efficiency in data analysis.

Even better, OPC UA provides a robust security model for data transfers by giving you End-To-
End encryption from the machine at the factory floor to the big data analytics platform.

Why Splunk?
By now, a lot of organisations understand the concept of Big Data and its potential to transform
maintenance, monitoring and performance optimisation of industrial machines. Its true, so much
progress has been achieved over the last decade in terms of storage mechanisms and efficient
processing of vast amounts of data. However, what has remained a bottleneck is the movement
of data from one domain to the other as is the case with moving data from industrial machines to
Big Data analytics tools.