Hey All, I've been getting acquainted with UMH for the past few days, I've installed the stack and do get data from my PiPLC. I'm a little bit confused as to what part of the stack/microservices are connected/work "out of the box" and where I need to step in a set stuff up. For instance, I've read/seen a video somewhere that the data flow is generally going from MQTT->kafka. Looking at the tutorial, I'm seeing how to send data to the MQTT broker, does this mean that the MQTT broker is already publishing to the kafka broker and then sending it to the timescaledb? My goal at the moment would be to test out the dataflow from my opcua tags -> grafana. It's unclear to me also how to best use the data model. Thanks for the help!

Generally, most of it is out of the box. You "just" need to send some messages in the dataformat and the KPIs and values will automatically arrive in Kafka, TimescaleDB and Grafana

yeah, I got that far and do have some signals going to Grafana now. Is there anywhere where I can see the general "architecture'" of the services/pods in the stack out of curiosity?

you are not the only one, we are currently re-working the documentation right now 🙂 You can find a medium-level architecture here: https://learn.umh.app/docs/architecture/ Not all pods are explained (i think redis is not in there), but all high-level microservices

That's exactly what I was looking for thanks. I'll be digging into factory insight and the data model soon!

nice, if you have any other questions, feel free to asj!

Other quick question,if I have some tags from OPC-UA, should I push them to the mqtt server or directly to Kafka in nodered?

we recommend pushing them directly to Kafka if it is on the same server. MQTT makes only sense if you are sending data via unreliable connections and / or have a huge amount of different devices (> 1000 devices)

that's what I thought, thanks!