Industrial IT monitoring
Digitalization and IT/OT-convergence bring the worlds of IT and production together. This requires one monitoring
solution to give the digitalization teams one dashboard for everything they need to know from both worlds.
PRTG keeps monitoring simple, while ensuring performance, clarity and ease of use.
Unlimited version of PRTG for 30 days. After 30 days, PRTG reverts to a free version.
Or, you can upgrade to a paid license anytime.
Digitalization and monitoring
IIoT, Industry 4.0, M2M - digitalization of manufacturing is currently happening and has become a vital determinant in a global existential competition. Traditionally isolated shop floors and machines need access to the internet for logistics, predictive maintenance, and customer-individualized production. All this requires overall communication that is only possible through classic IT. IT/OT convergence, the merging of production and classic IT, is the consequence. It is vital to avoid risks, overcome obstacles, and establish new processes.
The three main challenges for digitalization
Digitalization faces three main challenges: security, communication and overview
The risks of exposing OT
Security has always been the main reason for the isolation of production. Machines and facilities have always been shielded from the outside world. Exposing shop floors so that machines can communicate with customers (letting them make direct orders, for example) and with other aspects of the infrastructure requires opening up OT in new ways. Convergence requires exposing OT, and this creates risks.
Communication problems
Due to their isolation, machines and facilities never had to communicate with the exterior (IT) world. As a result proprietary systems and protocols were developed, which are not compatible with classic IT. Universal protocols like MQTT or standards like OPC UA can put things right, but still too few IT systems understand such universal languages. Diverse protocols and standards handicap communication between IT and OT.
Lack of overview
Even simple IIoT initiatives require re-thinking and establishing new processes. Traditionally isolated areas must be connected, and new processes must be established and continuously controlled. To achieve and ensure this, a superior, central control station is required, or rather a SCADA system to monitor, visualize, control and regulate production and IT. Even simple digitalization initiatives require complex processes that can not be realized without a central control station or a SCADA system.
Monitoring as a building block for digitalization
Classic IT monitoring solutions have all the functionality for playing a major role in IT/OT convergence: ensure security,
monitor communication processes and give a central overview. But to do so, they must fulfil a number of conditions that are not self-evident:
Generate an overview
A simple report or the choice between three dashboards is not sufficient: To bring together IT and OT, a monitoring tool must allow the individual creation of maps and dashboards with the option of integrating icons and elements from both worlds to deliver understandable and familiar data to IT experts as well as OT specialists.
Take action
Sending an email to the system administrator is not sufficient for mixed IT/OT environments. A roles and rights system is required to establish individual alert management. It needs a broad range of alerting methods like SMS or push notifications to reach people away from their desk. Finally, triggering an action to automatically solve issues is often a must.
IT/OT convergence with PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG Network Monitor is a world leading IT monitoring solution combining a broad feature set with outstanding usability and maximum flexibility.
Beyond out-of-the-box support for all classic IT standards, PRTG offers a RESTful API as well as JSON and MQTT support to easily integrate shop floors,
IoT devices for monitoring environmental parameters, as well as IT devices and applications beyond common standards.
Monitoring of large and distributed environments
PRTG scales for infrastructure of any size. Due to its architecture, it allows for monitoring locally and geographically distributed environments with one implementation, one license and one central dashboard. This is vital when IT and OT environments are growing together. It helps to structure and organize complex setups and it also enables the mapping of complex organizational structures to dashboards and business services.
Universal communicator
PRTG not only “speaks” all common IT protocols and languages, it also understands JSON and MQTT to communicate with industrial or IoT devices. Its RESTful API is the basis to connect almost everything to PRTG by integrating with other translation specialists and tools. Using individual scripts with the API you can also trigger actions for actuators.
Security first
PRTG monitors all types of security tools, from firewalls to virus scanners or backup systems. It adds another level of security by revealing abnormal activity that might be a hint of malware attacks. With a failover cluster included in every license, PRTG does its job 24/7 without failures.
Precise information
In industrial IT, it is vital to inform the right person in the right place with the right information for every failure - in time! PRTG offers all methods of alerting, like Syslog messaging, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Email, SMS, or push notification. Combined with a roles and rights system and flexible alerting options, PRTG makes sure that every issue is noticed by the right person as soon as possible.
The customizable maps and dashboards of PRTG can easily be enhanced with custom icons to deliver information to technicians and engineers in a way they understand in a single glance.
Clear licensing, fair pricing
Every license of PRTG includes the entire functionality without add-ons or modules. This makes licensing clear and helps to calculate your ROI. PRTG comes in two different licensing options – CAPEX-based as a perpetual license or OPEX-based as subscription model, both with the option to easily scale your monitoring with growing demands.
Unlimited version of PRTG for 30 days. After 30 days, PRTG reverts to a free version.
Or, you can upgrade to a paid license anytime.
Paessler named Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for IT Infrastructure Monitoring
and for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics
“Great interface, intuitive, full REST support. custom scripts, rest sensors add extra value. We have been using PRTG for
10 years now in multiple environments and use cases. it has by far the best interface and very easy to setup without prior experience.”
Dev Ops Manager, Industry: Manufacturing, Role: R&D/Product Development, Firm Size: 500M-1B USD
Success stories from our customers
Companies around the world trust PRTG when it comes to ensuring the function of their IT systems.
PRTG supports intelligent manufacturing at Bosch Rexroth
Bosch Rexroth AG develops and produces electric drives with open control systems, which form the basis for intelligent production plants and thus the basis for industry 4.0 plants. Customers from a wide variety of industries around the world can order Rexroth products in 200,000 varieties and variable batch sizes. By converting the Lohr am Main and Erbach plants to an industry 4.0 environment, production became significantly more efficient, both in terms of quality and productivity.
Network management at Quaker Houghton runs smoothly thanks to PRTG
Quaker Houghton develops and produces industrial process fluids for manufacturers of steel, aluminum, cars, aircraft, machines and industrial parts, among others. The chemical company employs 4,400 people worldwide, spread across 78 offices, 34 production locations and 35 R&D locations. The European headquarters is located in Uithoorn, North Holland. From this location, Erik Kemper, Senior Global Infrastructure Engineer, together with his two American IT colleagues, manages Quaker Houghton's global network infrastructure.
Carambar & Co increases productivity with PRTG
To stabilize, improve reliability and optimize the performance of its Information System (IS), the new food and beverage group Carambar & Co decided to install an IT monitoring solution. PRTG was chosen by Carambar’s CIO, Marc Boullier for its ease of implementation and daily efficiency. The integration partner CVC IT advised Carambar & Co how to leverage the solution for optimal use.
Skytex Group monitors its entire technology infrastructure with PRTG
Skytex is one of the most important manufacturers in the North American and Latin American Free Trade Agreement region of high-twist polyester fabrics, as well as of circular knitted, dyed and printed synthetic fabrics with spandex. Due to its state-of-the-art equipment and technology, it is considered one of the most modern of its kind worldwide.
Get more deep-dive information here!
Would you like to discover more about industrial IT monitoring?
Then be sure to check out our inspirational blog posts and webinars.
Monitoring a production line with PRTG
This article will show you how a Biological Scientist with an IT background and an IT Network Administrator built an inexpensive, yet powerful production monitoring system with PRTG and simple sensors connected to a Raspberry PI.
Measure MQTT roundtrips with PRTG
In this blog post we introduce the MQTT Round Trip Sensor: you can monitor the availability of an MQTT broker to ensure your IoT devices can always deliver their data.
Why OPC UA will revolutionize industrial automation in the coming years
Learn more about Smart Factory, Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication and about collecting data for further processing and evaluation.
Unlimited version of PRTG for 30 days. After 30 days, PRTG reverts to a free version.
Or, you can upgrade to a paid license anytime.
