NSQ and OSI PI Integration

Input and output integration overview

<p>The NSQ Telegraf plugin reads metrics from the NSQD messaging system, allowing for real-time data processing and monitoring.</p>

<p>This setup converts Telegraf into a lightweight PI Web API publisher, letting you push any Telegraf metric into the OSI PI System with a simple HTTP POST.</p>

Integration details

NSQ

<p>The NSQ plugin interfaces with NSQ, a real-time messaging platform, enabling the reading of messages from NSQD. This plugin is categorized as a service plugin, meaning it actively listens for metrics and events rather than polling them at regular intervals. With an emphasis on reliability, it prevents data loss by tracking undelivered messages until they are acknowledged by outputs. The plugin allows for configurations such as specifying NSQLookupd endpoints, topics, and channels, and it supports multiple data formats for flexibility in data handling.</p>

OSI PI

<p>OSI PI is an data management and analytics platform used in energy, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure. The PI Web API is its REST interface, exposing endpoints such as <strong>/piwebapi/streams/{WebId}/value</strong> that accept JSON payloads containing a <code>Timestamp</code> and <code>Value</code>. By pairing Telegraf’s flexible HTTP output with this endpoint, any metric Telegraf collects—SNMP counters, Modbus readings, Kubernetes stats—can be written directly into PI without installing proprietary interfaces. The configuration above authenticates with Basic or Kerberos, serializes each batch to JSON, and renders a minimal body template that aligns with PI Web API’s single-value write contract. Because Telegraf already supports batching, TLS, proxies, and custom headers, this approach scales from edge gateways to cloud VMs, allowing organizations to back-fill historical data, stream live telemetry, or mirror non-PI sources (e.g., Prometheus) into the PI data archive. It also sidesteps older SDK dependencies and enables hybrid architectures where PI remains on-prem while Telegraf agents run in containers or IIoT devices.</p>

Configuration

NSQ

OSI PI

Input and output integration examples

NSQ

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Real-Time Analytics Dashboard</strong>: Integrate this plugin with a visualization tool to create a dashboard that displays real-time metrics from various topics in NSQ. By subscribing to specific topics, users can monitor system health and application performance dynamically, allowing for immediate insights and timely responses to any anomalies.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Event-Driven Automation</strong>: Combine NSQ with a serverless architecture to trigger automated workflows based on incoming messages. This use case could involve processing data for machine learning models or responding to user actions in applications, thus streamlining operations and enhancing user experience through rapid processing.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Multi-Service Communication Hub</strong>: Use the NSQ plugin to act as a centralized messaging hub among different microservices in a distributed architecture. By enabling services to communicate through NSQ, developers can ensure reliable message delivery while maintaining decoupled service interactions, significantly improving scalability and resilience.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Metrics Aggregation for Enhanced Monitoring</strong>: Implement the NSQ plugin to aggregate metrics from multiple sources before sending them to an analytics tool. This setup enables businesses to consolidate data from various applications and services, creating a unified view for better decision-making and strategic planning.</p> </li> </ol>

OSI PI

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Remote Pump Stations Telemetry Bridge</strong>: Install Telegraf on edge gateways at oil-field pump stations, gather flow-meter and vibration readings over Modbus, and POST them to the PI Web API. Operations teams view real-time data in PI Vision without deploying heavyweight PI interfaces, while bandwidth-friendly batching keeps satellite links economical.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Green-Energy Micro-Grid Dashboard</strong>: Export inverter, battery, and weather metrics from MQTT into Telegraf, which relays them to PI. PI AF analytics can calculate real-time power balance and feed a campus dashboard; historical deltas inform sustainability reports.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Brownfield SCADA Modernization</strong>: Legacy PLCs logged to CSV are ingested by Telegraf’s <code>tail</code> input; each row is parsed and immediately sent to PI via HTTP, creating a live data stream that co-exists with archival files while the SCADA upgrade proceeds incrementally.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Synthetic Data Generator for Training</strong>: Telegraf’s <code>exec</code> input can run a script that emits simulated sensor patterns. Posting those metrics to a non-production PI server through the Web API supplies realistic datasets for PI Vision training sessions without risking production tags.</p> </li> </ol>

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