Introduction to PI Connector for MQTT Sparkplug

PI Connector for MQTT Sparkplug is an MQTT client that retrieves data from MQTT servers with service nodes and devices adhering to the Sparkplug specification. The Sparkplug specification, created for Machine-to-Machine (M2M)/Internet of Things (IOT) communications, allows communication between MQTT clients through an MQTT server (broker). It uses the lightweight MQTT publish/subscribe messaging protocol to define an MQTT topic namespace, an MQTT message payload format, and a method for performing MQTT state management.

Clients subscribe to topics to publish and receive messages. Servers manage the communication between clients by keeping track of client subscriptions to topics, and by forwarding published messages to the appropriate clients.

PI Connector for MQTT Sparkplug collects data when new data is published to subscribed topics. The connector is notified, through a process called report-by-exception, and the new data is processed.

PI Connector for MQTT Sparkplug can connect to multiple MQTT servers and can be configured to specific topics using standard MQTT topic filtering. The publish/subscribe infrastructure effectively standardizes SCADA/IIoT communications.