Sensor-Online supports MQTT in both directions: as a subscriber (consuming data from external brokers) and as a publisher (pushing sensor data to your own broker or third-party systems). Full Sparkplug B encoding is included, enabling seamless integration with industrial SCADA systems and historian databases that rely on structured payloads.<\/p>\n
MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is a lightweight publish-subscribe protocol designed for constrained devices and low-bandwidth networks. A sensor publishes a measurement to a topic; every system subscribed to that topic receives it immediately. The protocol is used in everything from home automation to large-scale industrial control systems.<\/p>\n
Key advantages of MQTT in IoT deployments:<\/p>\n
Sparkplug B is a specification built on top of MQTT that standardises topic namespacing, payload encoding (using Google Protocol Buffers) and device state management. It is the most widely adopted standard for connecting IoT data to industrial applications such as Ignition by Inductive Automation, Kepware and similar SCADA\/historian platforms.<\/p>\n
Sensor-Online publishes sensor data as Sparkplug B NBIRTH, NDATA and NDEATH messages, making it straightforward to subscribe from any Sparkplug-compatible application without custom parsing.<\/p>\n
MQTT connections are configured directly in the Sensor-Online administration panel. You specify the broker address, port, authentication credentials and the topic structure. For Sparkplug B, you select the Sparkplug B output format and map your device groups to the appropriate namespace. No coding is required.<\/p>\n
For Node-RED users, the combination of Sensor-Online\u2019s MQTT output and Node-RED\u2019s MQTT nodes provides a no-code way to build custom routing, transformation and forwarding workflows between systems.<\/p>\n
Sensor-Online connects to any standard MQTT broker \u2014 Mosquitto, HiveMQ, EMQX, AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub and others. TLS\/SSL connections and username\/password authentication are supported.<\/p>\n
Yes. A single Sensor-Online instance can subscribe to incoming data from one broker while publishing to a different broker or topic namespace at the same time.<\/p>\n
No, but it is strongly recommended if the target SCADA or historian natively supports Sparkplug B. It removes the need to write custom payload parsers and ensures device state (birth\/death certificates) is tracked correctly.<\/p>\n
Learn more about Sensor-Online\u2019s integration capabilities<\/a> or explore the knowledge base<\/a> for configuration guides.<\/p>\n