Litmus Edge

Litmus Edge is a complete operating system based on Linux that eases deployment and management at the edge. It can be run on a bare-metal  hardware device or within a VM. With the DTVD for Manufacturing Edge, the optimal physical or virtual hardware depends on the deployment scenario or the type of connectivity that is required for industrial systems.

As shown in the following diagram, Litmus Edge is typically the interface between enterprise IT applications and industrial systems and networks.

Figure 8.   Litmus Edge connectivity and integration

Litmus Edge enables connectivity of manufacturing assets, with more than 250 different OT-based protocols available out of the box, along with the capability to build custom connectivity. It can collect, normalize, and contextualize data for further use on edge devices or northbound to your enterprise IT systems and platform.

The Litmus Edge platform has many integrated features and capabilities, such as:

• Flows and Analytics—allowing intuitive and GUI-driven approaches to building analytical engines around data ingested from OT at the edge. This capability can build specific use cases and KPI-specific data visualizations, while templates are provided for common use cases such as OEE and predictive maintenance.
• Applications Marketplace—where specific edge applications can be pulled from a central repository running on Litmus Edge Manager. This solution runs any application that has been containerized. By default, it has common applications in place, but custom apps can also be deployed, including ML models developed on data centers or cloud platforms.
• Integrations—enabling the northbound connectivity, and a key component to abstracting industrial asset data. Within the DTVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus, a default integration is the Streaming Data Platform, sending all streamed data ingested to SDP and any analytical outputs created on Litmus Edge. The integration capability also has an integrated Store and Forward capacity, so no data is lost during a network outage.
• OPC UA—defining connections to Open Platform Communications (OPC) servers, and allowing users to build integrations from any system needing data access in Litmus using the OPC UA interface.

Litmus Edge can also export its configuration to a template for scale and ease of deployment through Litmus Edge Manager, offering operational consistency.

As part of the DTVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus, Litmus Edge has been tested and validated running as a VM on VxRail and on PowerEdge servers running VMware vSphere.

Litmus Edge Manager

Litmus Edge Manager is a centralized management platform for all devices running Litmus Edge. It provides a management layer for the Litmus Edge environment to create ease of deployment and scale, as outlined in the following figure.

Figure 9.   Litmus Edge Manager – edge management at scale

Litmus Edge Manager defines a hierarchy to manage all edge devices running Litmus Edge to reflect operations at global, regional, site, or production line levels.

Within Edge Manager, a logical group of devices is defined as a Project. This helps with the management edge devices with a specific use (connected to specific machines) or in a specific area in manufacturing (production line, build cells, warehouse, and more).

Key features within Litmus Edge Manager include:

• Device Management, or the configuration, Over-The-Air (OTA) updates, and deployment templates for all Litmus Edge devices.
• Application, Analytics, and Orchestration, or the deployment and management of applications running on Litmus Edge, including configuration templates and centralized management of flows and analytics running on Litmus Edge.
• Remote Access, or the management of user access to the Litmus environment, including role-based access control.
• Events, Alerts, and Incident Monitoring, providing oversight on all Litmus deployment activity to support troubleshooting and manage configured alerts.
• Marketplace Catalog, where application containers are published and made available for deployment to Litmus Edge.

On the DTVD for Manufacturing Edge with Litmus, Edge Manager runs as a VM on VxRail or PowerEdge, depending on the deployment.

Litmus documentation

To learn more about the Litmus solutions, browse the Litmus Documentation Portal, which provides full technical documentation on all aspects of the solutions, including:

• Core products
• Add-on products
• Developer tools
• Recommended reading
• Customer success
• FAQ and release notes

The following figure offers a sample view of the Litmus Documental portal.

Figure 10.    Litmus Documentation Portal

Note: Access is provided to the Litmus Documentation portal once Litmus licenses are fulfilled. For the standard Litmus documentation and messaging, see the Additional Resources section.