Ignition IIoT: Snowflake Integration

Jan 10

We had a great year of building solid foundations in 2023. Along with releasing our Unified Namespace: The Ultimate Guide ebook, we shared a lot about Ignition and SCADA in the Cloud. We also laid the foundation for keeping an entire team of Corso Systems employees busy with Ignition Conversions.

Our year was incredibly busy after the Ignition Community Conference in September, so we decided to wait until 2024 to discuss the Cirrus Link IIoT Bridge for Snowflake, an amazing addition to the Ignition ecosystem!

What is Snowflake?

Through the lens of manufacturing data management, Snowflake can be most simply described as a Data Lake. A Data Lake can collect and store any and all relevant data for a particular user, in our case a manufacturing operation.

Beyond Data Lake functionality, the Snowflake platform can integrate data across your entire organization to enable common information system use cases like trending and dashboards. It also allows for artificial intelligence and machine learning integrations, along with data pipelines to applications across your business. Snowflake can even enable collaboration across your enterprise.

Compared to traditional data integration methods, Snowflake simplifies overall integration costs across your entire organization. Rather than directly connecting different systems to each other in a pre-Data Lake world, with Snowflake you connect your systems to it (just like a Data Lake) and everything has access to your data out of the box. From there, you can build technology and applications on top of Snowflake, use the data for dashboards and trends, and automatically build out a Unified Namespace using the metadata from your plant floor systems.

Why Use Snowflake & the IIoT Bridge Module?

If Ignition is the bridge between Information and Operations Technology (IT/OT), Snowflake functions as the bridge between technology and your business. Adding the IIoT Bridge module to your architecture will merge Ignition and Snowflake to give you the data, information, and context for better understanding how your business operates. It will also help you make informed decisions to optimize your outcomes.

Snowflake can be a Data Lake, but it can also provide many more benefits to your company including:

Snowflake supports ALL Ignition and Sparkplug data types. You no longer need to pick and chose
Snowflake stores ALL of your Ignition tag metadata, not just values, timestamps, and quality
- Bring across units, scaling, deadbands, tooltips, notes, custom properties, etc.
- Store the metadata with your time series data for full visibility into your operation at any point in time
Snowflake manages your Models and Assets saving you additional overhead as your data structures grow
Lightning fast integration with Ignition. Connect the IIoT Bridge Module to your Ignition Gateway and data will begin flowing once you click “Save”

Build Your Unified Namespace Automatically

Snowflake takes full advantage of the MQTT Sparkplug B protocol and will parse your data structures coming from Ignition to automatically generate your Models and Asset Hierarchy—and build a Unified Namespace for you.

This allows all the users of your data to pull in the correct information for populating their systems by drilling into your company’s common asset hierarchy. With Snowflake and your Unified Namespace integrated AI and ML tools, you can level up your operations more quickly and easily that ever before. You can skip past the more complicated integration methods of the past decades!

Wrapping Up

Recently, Snowflake has become an almost ubiquitous term in manufacturing.

It unites the best integration concepts of the last few years with MQTT and Sparkplug B integration
Snowflake simplifies manufacturing focused data structures like the Unified Namespace
It provides a common platform for integrating data and information across your entire enterprise

At this point, combining Snowflake with the power of Ignition is almost a no brainer if you want to make your data and information as valuable as possible to the greatest number of users. The IIoT Bridge Module builds on Ignition’s modular architecture. Adding it any Ignition Gateway will truly bring your company into the modern age.