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The MQTT Broker for HighByte Intelligence Hub

Use the embedded, fully compliant broker to reduce cost and complexity.

Simplify MQTT data ingest at the edge and across your enterprise.

HighByte Intelligence Hub now includes a native, embedded MQTT broker designed to be holistically integrated into Industrial DataOps workloads and flexibly deployed where needed. Instantly enable the broker in the Intelligence Hub UI to publish and subscribe from connections within the hub, as well as external MQTT clients.

Compliant and Performant

Built by HighByte for the Intelligence Hub, the embedded broker provides full support for MQTT v3.1.1 and v5. The Intelligence Hub can broker, examine, and interpret all message payloads natively, whether they are encoded in JSON or Sparkplug.​

Secure and Flexible Transport

In addition to standard MQTT nodes, the embedded broker can interface with browser-based applications and nodes residing on restricted, HTTP-centric networks. Connect clients with either MQTT (mqtt.tcp) or WebSocket (mqtt.ws) transport. All connections can be secured with transport layer security (TLS).

Simplified Deployment

HighByte Intelligence Hub is an integrated, all-in-one solution built for edge deployments throughout the enterprise. The Intelligence Hub collects, contextualizes, and brokers data in one application. This eliminates the need for a separate broker and is ideal for distributed architectures.
 
Multiple instances of the Intelligence Hub can be locally deployed to simplify data ingest from MQTT-based sensors, devices, and gateways. By localizing data brokering and modeling, data becomes more accessible and relevant at greater scale and pace. This reduces the cost and complexity of making intelligence usable, wherever it may reside within the enterprise.

Embedded or Bring-Your-Own Broker

The embedded MQTT broker is an ideal complement to third-party brokers. The Intelligence Hub connects to its own broker the same way it would connect to a third-party broker, providing architectural flexibility. Regardless of complexity, the Intelligence Hub can be deployed with any broker that meets the needs of the application. 

The embedded broker is intended to be deployed locally at the edge near sources of industrial data in a factory or other industrial environment. It is designed to augment, not replace, enterprise-class brokers, which offer redundancy, horizontal scaling, and other advanced capabilities.

Unified Administration and Visibility

The embedded MQTT broker is tightly integrated with the core data integration, contextualization, and administration capabilities in the Intelligence Hub. From a single interface, both data governance and brokering can be orchestrated across one or many instances of the Intelligence Hub wherever producers or consumers of data may reside.
 
To obtain visibility into the health of your Industrial DataOps infrastructure, simply subscribe to the $SYS topic. The embedded broker exposes state, diagnostics, and statistics in real time to its own broker. Examples include the number of clients, messages, subscriptions, publishes, and size of data stored and transmitted. The $SYS topic can be subscribed to by any MQTT client to monitor the availability and utilization of the Intelligence Hub.

Users can also leverage the embedded UNS Client to visually browse, interrogate, and test their UNS without an external test client. When coupled with the embedded MQTT broker, the UNS Client enables the visualization of MQTT-based Industrial DataOps workloads in a single, unified engineering environment.

BUILD THE FOUNDATION FOR YOUR UNIFIED NAMESPACE

Learn more about the UNS architecture and capabilities available within HighByte Intelligence Hub.

A Unified Namespace (UNS) is an exciting design pattern for integrating industrial data into a scalable and accessible structure that provides a real-time view of operations across the business. A UNS typically employs an MQTT broker, publishing data in a highly prescribed and controlled structure. In an enterprise deployment, a UNS may be a federation of many localized namespaces. 

Native UNS Capabilities

The MQTT broker in HighByte Intelligence Hub is ideal for rapidly building a local UNS. By simply enabling this feature in the UI, the Intelligence Hub can be transformed into an MQTT broker—enhanced by the hub’s innate integration and modeling capabilities. When combined with enterprise administration of localized hubs, HighByte Intelligence Hub delivers a scalable and holistic approach to achieving a UNS.

Topic Hierarchy

A UNS typically follows the equipment hierarchy prescribed by ISA-95 Part 2 Object Model Attributes: Company, Site, Area, Line, Cell, Asset. With the Intelligence Hub, the UNS topic hierarchy can be built out with dynamic addressing sourced from payloads, system variables, or even manually set values.  This makes organizing the UNS more manageable. Use the Intelligence Hub to govern not just the data itself, but where the data is published into the UNS. 

Data Payloads

At each topic level of the UNS, appropriate data can be published for other clients to subscribe to.  With the Intelligence Hub, data can be published as individual JSON or Sparkplug payloads. In some cases, there may be a preference to subscribe to individual values independent of the structure in which they reside. In this case, payload structures can be easily broken into individual value publishes to the broker using the new data Pipelines capability in HighByte Intelligence Hub. Regardless, the data can be easily subscribed to by the Intelligence Hub’s embedded UNS Client or a third-party client and brokered through the Intelligence Hub.

Ready to try HighByte Intelligence Hub?

Join the free trial program to get hands-on access to all the features and functionality within HighByte Intelligence Hub and start testing the software in your unique environment.