What is Assetwolf?

Many people ask me about Assetwolf's system architecture. Here's my quick guide.

System architecture

Assetwolf is the customer-facing end of an IoT system. There are typically several components involved:

• remote hardware device: connected to your asset (for industrial applications it may connect to the PLC of a machine, while for tracking applications it may be standalone
• network connectivity: usually the device connects via the GSM mobile networks to a cloud-based enterprise platform
• cloud-based enterprise platform: our platform of choice is the Sierra Wireless AirVantage platform, as this manages connectivity, has massive data storage capability, and can process rules and alerts
• the Assetwolf platform: presents the data to engineers or customers, handles user authentication and security, can process rules can integrate with third-party systems (ERP etc.), and can be customised visually or even made part of a larger website.

IoT data storage

Within Assetwolf's control is a scalable amount of storage.

We use a MySQL database for all "current" information: this means the latest data about a "thing", or asset, plus data about asset types, companies, locations and users.

Then we use MongoDB as a mass-storage database. MongoDB (from the word "humungous") is designed from the ground up with mass scalability in mind, and is a "No SQL" database. More about this in my MongoDB article. But suffice to say that this is where we store all archived data about assets.

Platform as a service

Assetwolf is available as platform as a service (PaaS), and is developed, operated and maintained by Tribal Systems. We can operate your portal on either our own secure Linux-based hardware, platform, via the Amazon Cloud, or on a dedicated hardware server. Assetwolf is also available as a paid-for download, please contact us for enquiries.