Making it easy to create dashboards for MQTT Sparkplug with InfluxDB and HiveMQ

At HiveMQ, we think MQTT Sparkplug is a key ingredient to the success of modernization efforts in the manufacturing and industrial sectors. Sparkplug provides the consistent data payload format and topic namespaces that are critical to breaking down the data barriers that exist in these industries.

In our conversations with customers and vendors who are deploying Sparkplug, the first thing many of these companies want to do is visualize the industrial data from the equipment into some type of dashboards.
The easiest way to do this is to load the Sparkplug data into a time series database, like InfluxDB, and create dashboards from this data source.

In Sparkplug, a MQTT broker is at the center of a Sparkplug architecture so we wanted to enable this use case to be as easy as possible with HiveMQ. Therefore, we are pleased to have published on GitHub a new HiveMQ extension for storing MQTT Sparkplug data into InfluxDB and created some template dashboards for visualizing the data. This is an early beta release so we are hoping to hear feedback and ideally pull requests for improvements. Installation is super simple since it is a HiveMQ extension.

As a word of caution, we do not believe this extension is ready for production deployments yet, so please proceed with caution. Let us know if you are interested in using this in production.