I’m interested to see if Netdata can be used to monitor data from production equipment such as CNC machines, furnaces, pumps, presses, etc. Types of data can be preassure, gas/liquid flow counters, counters, movements, voltages, temperatures, vibrations, etc etc.
Has anyone done this, and what is your experience doing that?
Hi @Forza !
Could you please provide some more information? Are you going to use something like http://linuxcnc.org/ ?
Also, how are the sensors going to be exposed to the system?
Please have a look in the meantime at this Python plugin, which uses lm-sensors . I imagine this would be the easiest point to start from if you were to write your own plugin.
Hi @Dim-P
Thanks for replying.
These days, all major manufacturers of PLCs support the OPC-UA standard for communicating data to external systems over normal IP networks. Unified Architecture - OPC Foundation It supports both normal polling, but subscriptions so that the client can receive notifications of major events, alarms, changed values, etc.
One great thing with OPC-UA is that is also supports the browsing and automatic discovery of exported tags/values/sensors. This would allow Netdata to automatically setup charts for a connected system 
My hope it to be able to use the OPC-UA protocol to monitor machines. OPC-UA support would be a great addition to Netdata, because today, there is no complete, open, and easy way to do this. At the moment we have Kepware, Ignition or Siemens, all propriatary and extremely expensive and complicated solutions.
LM-sensors or IPMI monitoring is quite close in essence to the types of data I would want to log.
Just so happens I have spent quite a lot of time with OPC in my past :D.
Yes it could be interesting use case, but AFAIK we currently do not have any collector/plugin for it.
As @Dim-P mentioned we always welcome contributions and making a new collector (plugin) is purposefully made as easy as possible (writing text to pipe, any language can be used).
I’ll think about how to go about this. Perhaps it would be possible to task/hire someone for this possible. Does Netdata offer such services?
Hi @Forza ,
Thanks for raising this, it is definitely an interesting domain and something that we at Netdata would like to dive more into - not clear yet where this would fall in our roadmap, we need to do some more analysis on this.
Perhaps it would be possible to task/hire someone for this possible. Does Netdata offer such services?
AFAIK this isn’t something that we have done in the past, but let me raise it internally and come back to you once I have something on this.