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Configuring the Watson IoT Platform for Maximo Asset Health Insights 7.6

Technical Blog Post


Abstract

Configuring the Watson IoT Platform for Maximo Asset Health Insights 7.6

Body

Today I’m going to write a bit about a new product recently released called Maximo Asset Health Insights 7.6 which is an add-on for the current release of Maximo 7.6.0.5.  I’m not going to document the install itself as it works the same as all of our other Industry Solutions using the Installation Manager.  If you need assistance with this, please review our Knowledge Center Documentation hereWhat I want to discuss in more detail is some of the configuration steps required on both the Maximo side and the Iot Platform side to allow for Maximo Asset Health Insights to connect to the IoT Platform.

 

The steps to connect from Maximo are minimal and require you to just put in your IoT Platform API information, however there are some issues you will run in to if your Application Server and  IoT Platform\Cloudant database are not configured correctly.  I’m not going to step by step through the entire configuration, but I will provide notes based off the recent configurations I've done.

 

Before we start you should have the following installed to Blue Mix and bound. The Cloudant database and The Internet of Things Platform  can be found in the Internet of Things Platform Starter boiler plate.

 

  1. Internet of Things Platform
  2. Cloudant
  3. Secure Gateway

 

IoT Platform Configuration

 

To make your connection between Maximo and the IoT Platform you need an Organization, API Key and Authentication Token.   We can collect this from your IoT Platform Dashboard, which can be linked from Blue Mix if you're not sure of the address.

 

1.The first thing we need to note is the Orangization ID, it can be found in the top right hand corner of the IoT Dashboard, this is a mix of 6 characters (numbers and letters).  It can also be pulled from the settings page as the short name.

 

2.The second thing you need to do is generate an API key and Token.  You can do this by clicking on Access in your IoT Dashboard, then on the API Keys link.

image

 

Be sure to write down your token as it will not show it again after creation.  The API key will be listed under this section for future reference.

 

3.The last thing we need to do on the Platform is enable 'Time Series DB' to create the IoT Platform History Databases in Cloudant.   

 

To do this click on Settings, then turn on 'Time Series DB' and Enable your Cloudant database as seen below, the database name should be left as default and time set to 1 month.  Changing the database name will cause issues with the connection from the IOTHISTCLOUD end point.

 

image

Once done click on 'Confirm All Changes'

 

 

Creating Cloudant Database Credentials

 

The next thing we need to do is create our Cloudant database credentials to supply to the IOTHISTCLOUD endpoint in Maximo.  This can be done from Blue Mix, click on your Cloudant Database service,  select  'Server Credentials', then 'Add New Credential'

 

image

 

Once you add the credential a JSON string will show below with your database credentials,  your username, password, host and URL will have a large string of characters defined instead of what I’m showing below.  That is normal, I replaced the values to keep my credentials private.

 

{

    "credentials": {

        "username": "username-bluemix",

        "password": "password",

        "host": "usename-bluemix.cloudant.com",

        "port": 443,

        "url": "https://username-bluemix:[email protected]"

    }

}

 

Configure Secure Gateway

 

If your Maximo Environment is not on a public domain a Secure Gateway will be required so the IoT Platform can talk back to your Maximo Environment.  Blue Mix provides this service as well as the client to be installed on the Maximo Server.  I will detail this in another blog and link to it once done, if any questions regarding this in the mean time, please feel free to comment below.

 

SSL Configuration for IoT Platform and Cloudant Database

 

Your IoT Platform and Cloudant databases are both secured with HTTPs, so we need to ensure the certificates are trusted by the WebSphere Application Server.   We can do this with the following steps.

 

  1.  Log in to WebSphere and expand Security and click on SSL Certificate and Key Management.
  2. Click on Key Stores and Certificates
  3. Select the CellDefaultTrustStore and then select Signer Certificates under Additional Properties
  4. Click on Retrieve from Port
  5. Enter in the host of you IoT Dashboard, Port and Alias as seen below and click retrieve from port

Host:  yourorg.internetofthings.ibmcloud.com

Port:  443:

Alias:  IoTF-Platform (or any other identifier)

 

  1. Now repeat the above steps again for the Cloudant Database host

Host:  clouadantdatabasehostname

Port: 443

Alias: IoTF-Cloudant

 

Once done you should have certificate in your trust store similar to what’s seen below.  Now you can sync your changes and restart your Maximo JVM's

 

image

 

 

 

Configuring Maximo

We have one more step to configure in Maximo before making our IoT Connection for Asset Health and that is to configure the IOTHISTCLOUD endpoint to point to our Cloudant Database.


From Maximo go to the End Points application under Integration and select the IOTHISTCLOUD endpoint.

 

image

 

There are 3 properties to fill in, the USERNAME, PASSWORD and URL.  All of these were provided in the JSON string from your Cloudant database above. Once the endpoint is configured, we can log in to your  http://yourhost/maximo-x  user interface with a user in the Reliability Engineer group and make the connection to the Watson IoT Platform. This is done from either the configuration menu option or the getting started panel,  by entering your ORIG ID,  API Key and API token we generated on the IoT Platform. 

image

 

If the connection is successful you should now see links for registering and viewing the device types from the IoT Platform. 

 

image

 

That's all for this blog,  there is still much more to document regarding IoT and Maximo Asset Health Insights, such as Associating Meters, Crontasks and Configuring IoT Real Time Insights.  I will follow up this blog with another regarding configuring a secure gateway if required.  Any questions comments or concerns please post below. 

 

 

 

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ibm11130841