Events

Events capture meaningful observations at a specific point-in-time, or over a span of time, and can be used to model transactional data from a Manufacturing Execution System or Batch Execution System, equipment utilization data, equipment startups and shutdowns, shifts, or process excursions like high temperature events.

Note: This type of event data should not be confused with SDS events, which are data values manually added to an SDS stream. See Add event.

Events can help put process data into a business context. You can think of events as bookmarks for your process data, helping to shorten the time to insight.

Some of the questions you can answer by having event context are:

• What was my process doing during the event?

• What was the maximum temperature of my equipment during the event?

• What happened leading up to the event or after the event?

You can look across events and ask:

• Which types of events are occurring most frequently?

• When did my wind turbines have a fault in the past month?

• What was the temperature for my last 30 batches?

Events can be queried, created, modified, and deleted through the REST API and GraphQL API.

Reference data

Reference data captures primary data and additional metadata to add context to events. You can use reference data to model data such as material definitions, products, alarm severity categories, or downtime reasons that can be referenced in the context of an event to provide useful additional context when data is consumed, analyzed, visualized, and reported on.

Reference data can be queried, created, modified, and deleted through the REST API and GraphQL API.

Benefits of event data

Value provided by events:

• Events make it easier to analyze an occurrence, and easier to find related data to the event.

• Production performance and quality can be analyzed across sites, making reporting easier.

• Events provide a clearer picture of processes.

• Events allow you to view your time-series data in a meaningful way.

There is also great value in having multisite data centralized across the enterprise and more accessible to a greater number of users and applications in the cloud. Having event data on a cloud platform offers advantages such as:

• Analytics are easier to facilitate with cloud-based data science and machine learning tools.

• The cloud provides a single place for you to aggregate data so partner applications can leverage it.

• The data is easier to share with your trusted business partners from the cloud.

• The cloud is designed to naturally scale to handle events across your enterprise.