Harnessing the Power of IoT in Water, Sanitation, and Beyond
In our rapidly evolving digital landscape, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a transformative technology, revolutionizing how industries operate and make critical decisions. From agriculture to mining, energy utilities, and traffic management, IoT is reshaping the way we approach efficiency, innovation, and operational optimization.
In the water and sanitation sector, IoT-enabled sensors are automating irrigation systems, optimizing water distribution, monitoring quality, and tracking consumption. Similarly, mining and public transportation organizations are leveraging IoT to monitor vehicle status, performance, and fuel efficiency, ensuring operational safety and sustainability.
As businesses across diverse verticals increasingly embrace these IoT technologies, integrating IoT metrics with advanced observability solutions like Dynatrace has become essential. This integration enables organizations to gain comprehensive, end-to-end visibility, unlock deeper insights, and make more informed decisions.
Unleashing the Potential of Edge IoT Data
Dynatrace offers a feature-rich agent, Dynatrace OneAgent®, and an agentless open-source approach through OpenTelemetry, both tailored for edge-IoT use cases. These solutions allow organizations to ingest and process raw data and metrics from their IoT devices, unlocking a wealth of opportunities for advanced analytics and informed decision-making.
In this article, we’ll explore a captivating use case within the aviation industry, showcasing how to leverage OpenTelemetry and Dynatrace to enhance the monitoring and management capabilities of IoT data.
Tracking Aircraft in Real-Time with ADS-B
Have you ever wondered how services like Flightradar24 or FlightAware collect and report live aircraft location details? The answer lies in Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), a technology that enables real-time aircraft tracking and enhanced situational awareness for air traffic control and collision avoidance systems.
Each aircraft equipped with an ADS-B transponder regularly broadcasts GPS-derived position, altitude, velocity, and other critical information at a frequency of 1090 MHz. These broadcasts are received by ground stations and other aircraft with ADS-B receivers, enabling the live tracking and monitoring of aircraft movements.
Unlike web technologies that rely on the internet and HTTP for data transfer, ADS-B utilizes direct radio frequency broadcasts for real-time communication. This protocol is designed specifically for physical tracking and monitoring in the aviation industry, much like other IoT monitoring solutions in various sectors.
Collecting and Ingesting ADS-B Data
To demonstrate the process of collecting and ingesting ADS-B data, we’ll leverage a Raspberry Pi equipped with a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver and the dump1090 ADS-B decoder software. This setup will act as our IoT device, capturing and processing the ADS-B data packets.
The aircraft.json file generated by the dump1090 application contains a wealth of information, including timestamp, aircraft identifiers, position coordinates, altitude, speed, and signal power. This data is essential for advanced analytics and aircraft tracking, providing valuable insights that extend beyond short-term live monitoring.
To ensure long-term storage and enhanced analysis capabilities, we’ll leverage Dynatrace and the OpenTelemetry Collector to ingest the ADS-B data into the Dynatrace platform. This approach allows us to store the data for extended periods, from 1 day up to 10 years, and correlate it with other business processes to unlock deeper insights.
Unlocking Advanced Analytics with Dynatrace
Once the ADS-B data is ingested into Dynatrace, we can leverage the powerful Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) to extract, analyze, and visualize the critical information. The Dynatrace Notebooks and Dashboards provide a seamless way to query the JSON-formatted data, extract key metrics, and create dynamic visualizations.
For example, we can use DQL commands like expand and fieldsFlatten to parse the JSON data and place the aircraft’s flight callsign, location, altitude, vertical rate, speed, and category into the appropriate columns and fields. This allows us to perform advanced analytics and generate insightful dashboards.
“`
aircraftData = data(“aircraft.json”)
.expand(“messages”)
.fieldsFlatten(“messages”)
.filter(true)
.top(50)
.as(“aircraftData”);
totalAircraft = aircraftData.select(“icaoAddress”).distinct().count();
maxAltitude = aircraftData.max(“altitude”);
“`
These DQL queries enable us to analyze a range of metrics, such as the total number of unique aircraft monitored, the highest altitude recorded, and other critical statistics. The results can be displayed on dynamic dashboards, providing stakeholders with valuable insights and decision-making support.
Enhancing Insights with Geospatial Calculations
To further enrich the analytics capabilities, we can incorporate geospatial calculations using the Haversine formula. This formula allows us to determine the distance between an aircraft and a specific location, such as an airport, based on the aircraft’s latitude and longitude coordinates.
By leveraging Dynatrace’s advanced analytics and mathematical functions, we can seamlessly integrate these trigonometric calculations into our DQL queries, empowering users with the ability to visualize and analyze the distance between aircraft and airports or other points of interest.
“`
distance = (
6371 * acos(
cos(radians(aircraftLat)) *
cos(radians(airportLat)) *
cos(radians(airportLon) – radians(aircraftLon)) +
sin(radians(aircraftLat)) *
sin(radians(airportLat))
)
).as(“distance”);
“`
These geospatial insights can be invaluable for various industries beyond aviation, such as mining, agriculture, and energy utilities, where understanding the proximity of assets or resources to specific locations is crucial for informed decision-making and operational optimization.
Extending Observability to the Edge
IoT devices are often deployed in challenging environments, making it critical to monitor not just their CPU and memory utilization, but also their network signal strength, environmental conditions, and other relevant metrics. Dynatrace’s custom metrics functionality allows you to leverage scripts to periodically collect this advanced data and send it to the Dynatrace metric ingestion endpoint, providing a comprehensive view of your IoT ecosystem.
By integrating ADS-B airplane data and leveraging powerful analytical capabilities like trigonometric calculations, Dynatrace enables organizations to extract actionable insights from their IoT data. This approach can be applied across a wide range of industries, from agriculture and mining to utilities and transportation, empowering stakeholders with the data-driven intelligence they need to drive efficiency, innovation, and sustainability.
Conclusion: Embracing the Future of IoT Observability
In today’s data-driven world, the integration of IoT technologies with advanced observability solutions like Dynatrace has become essential for businesses across various sectors. By leveraging OpenTelemetry and the Dynatrace platform, organizations can unlock the full potential of their edge IoT data, converting raw metrics into actionable insights that power informed decision-making and drive operational excellence.
The aviation use case presented in this article showcases the remarkable capabilities of Dynatrace in ingesting, analyzing, and visualizing complex IoT data. This same approach can be applied to a wide range of industries, empowering stakeholders with the data-driven intelligence they need to address pressing challenges, enhance sustainability, and foster innovation.
As we continue to witness the transformative impact of IoT, the fusion of edge data and advanced observability will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the future of water, sanitation, and beyond. By embracing these powerful technologies, organizations can unlock new levels of efficiency, optimize resource utilization, and drive positive change in their communities and the world at large.
To learn more about leveraging Dynatrace and OpenTelemetry for your IoT initiatives, please visit the Joint Action for Water website or explore the Dynatrace blog for additional resources and insights.
