upmkuhn / metricsexporter

MetricsExporter is a proof of concept MVP to extract live internal data from an SIMATIC S7 PLC and a B&R system without it's source code.

What is this Metrics exporter good for ?

ZenonMetricsExporter ELT is a proof of concept MVP to extract live internal data from an SIMATIC S7 PLC and a B&R system without it's source code.

So what, how does it do?

I think a diagram speaks a 1000 words to explain the whole set up. Its basically a normal ETL pipline (Extract, Transform, Load) that loads as much internal data from a system to do some easy explorative analysis.

Component	Responsibillity	Detail
S7 PLC	Controls an Kran suppliying a Wood gasifier with fuel.	Contains live KPI'se e.g. Wood usage
B&R PLC	Controls Wood gasifier plant / produce electricity	KPI data maybe useful for maintence planning
CloudMetrics Relay	Transform types, varibale names, and store it	Received data exporters "service"
Kapacitor	enforce monitoring rules	Alert via telegram if expected data is missing
Chronograf UI	Query data, Display graphs and create dashboards	Current interface to Influxdb
InfluxDb	Store , Query, intervals aggregation, trash old metrics	InfluxDB an time series database for lage volumes of data

Closing thoughts

Reverse engineer, the PLC controllers, was the most challenging and rewarding part of this project. It fascinated me to learn how industrial automation components work. It is a simple low-level computer with a network interface that exposes its variables using a memory address register and fix sized data types.
Perhaps WebSockets was not the best choice of protocol. My initial thought was it might become beneficial to keep a bi-directional connection between the exporter server. The need to keep message sizes small has created an unnecessary overhead of complexity, especially since an HTTP Post would have been just fine.