Monitoring and management software company Paessler has teamed up with automation provider Moxa to develop and sell converged IT/OT offerings to customers in manufacturing and industry.
Felix Berndt, EMEA business development manager for Paessler’s IIoT and datacentre business, said the partnership was about jointly creating a foundation targeting the needs of industrial customers that are merging their IT and operations technology (OT) environments.
“Using the [Paessler] PRTG role and rights system, dashboards, reports and alerts can be easily set up for the responsible employees,” Berndt said in the company announcement. “[Moxa’s] MXview also offers various management functions.”
Christian Gügel, product marketing manager at Moxa, added that rising compliance costs, cyber threat and operational risks are presenting more challenges for OT managers as they increase their IT use.
“Converged IT/OT networks offer clear business benefits,” he said.
The idea is that Paessler and Moxa will offer a holistic monitoring approach for industrial IT infrastructure that will help factories and other production facilities centralise their monitoring and management, while better securing their ever expanding networks.
Moxa offers devices and solutions for field devices from different manufacturers in the industrial IoT (IIoT) space including connectivity to the manufacturing execution systems (MES) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems typically used in industry.
Paessler’s PRTG supports SNMP, MQTT, OPC-UA and Modbus protocols that enable it to monitor diverse combinations of IT and OT in an IoT network, displaying collected data on a dashboard and issuing alerts based on that data.
A RESTful API and web widgets integrate data collected in MXview into PRTG — enabling centralised, cross-departmental monitoring of IT and OT within just one application. The companies said the benefits for customers include rapid fault identification through root cause analysis as well as enhanced security.
( Photo by Remy Gieling on Unsplash )
