What’s new in MindSphere and Operations Insight – April 2021?

Connecting The Things That Run The World

MindSphere releases deliver advanced industrial IoT capabilities that bring the physical and digital worlds closer together.

This update includes many of the newest and most exciting capabilities from the most recent MindSphere releases:

Start faster with the out-of-the-box (OOTB) MindSphere solution Operations Insight.
Upgrade seamlessly from Start for free to a full MindSphere solution.
Simplify Edge connectivity and processing with MindConnect Edge Analytics.
Dive deeper into your MindSphere usage with Usage Transparency enhancements.
Improve collaboration with Visual Flow Creator

MindSphere releases deliver advanced industrial IoT capabilities

Start faster with the OOTB MindSphere solution Operations Insight

Headlining this release is Operations Insight. Operations Insight is the next evolution of the OOTB IIoT MindSphere solution that brings together some of the most powerful features and capabilities into one central location. In other words, it serves as an IIoT starting point where users can immediately begin monitoring their production lines and machines. Scale and tailor the solution to your business needs with low-code application development and 3rd party and self-developed applications. For instance, some of the rich features and capabilities can be seen below:

Customizable Dashboards and Configurable Data Access

Inbuilt, Immediate Site and Fleet Management and Monitoring

Intuitive and Visual Timeseries Data Analysis

Versatile and Easy KPI Management

Maintenance Work Order Management

Flexible Rules and Alerts

Upgrade Seamlessly from Start for free to the full MindSphere solution

Easily assign roles as a Tenant Administrator for Operations Insight

Operations Insight is fully integrated with MindSphere and available by default on all tenants. In other words, tenant administrators need to add Operations Insight roles to the tenant and then to users.

In addition to Operations Insight, this release empowers Start for free users to easily convert their free tenant into an upgraded, full tenant of MindSphere through the Upgrade App.

Use the Upgrade app to convert to a full MindSphere tenant

The step-by-step tour guide makes for a quick transition

As it can be seen in the video, the tour guide offers step-by-step assistance, simple online registration and fast technical provisioning within minutes for easy registration and quick purchase.

After purchasing the Basic Starter Package, Start for free users transform their free account into a full MindSphere tenant while keeping the existing free tenant and all the assets previously configured.

Fast provisioning allows you to get started in minutes

Simplify Edge Connectivity and Processing with MindConnect Edge Analytics

Furthermore, MindConnect Edge Analytics is now an App for Industrial Edge. Install it from the Industrial Edge Management Hub. After install and onboarding, the Industrial Edge becomes represented as an Edge Device in the MindConnect Edge Analytics Application in MindSphere.

Similarly, tailor your edge connectivity solution with MindConnect Software Agent through a new UI plugin for MindConnect Edge Analytics for Industrial Edge. This plugin supports Mass Data Import functionality of data-source configuration in MindConnect Software Agent UI.

Dive deeper into your MindSphere usage with Usage Transparency enhancements

Another important highlight of this release is the new Usage Transparency on Operator Apps. With this application, operators can share usage details with their application customers with a CSV download or graphical reports. In addition to that, application customers can view the app usage details accordingly in Usage Transparency on the new “Applications” tab.

Meanwhile, operation and user experience improvements make retrieving recent usage data easier. Usage data up to three months old is available in an overview list and can be downloaded as a CSV starting from the day of deployment.

Improve Collaboration with Visual Flow Creator

On top of that, this release has brought improved simplicity and operation to Visual Flow Creator. Share flows across your organization with files stored in an asset or custom payloads via email attachments. Additional usage enhancements to Visual Flow Creator include a preview chart for KPI input values and an indicator for remaining compute hours to track limits.