It’s been a long couple of sprints, but your team has managed to pull together and complete the features promised for delivery. Your unit tests have passed, and you feel confident in rolling your changes out to production. However, there’s a last minute ask to fix a minor bug by updating one of your project dependencies. There’s no change to your code base, and everyone thinks it should be a low risk change, so it’s pulled in last minute. But as soon as the change is included, all the tests start failing, and chaos ensues. After a day of painful troubleshooting, it’s determined that the newer dependency broke backwards compatibility with your application, and your application stopped working as a result. Good version management could have helped you avoid this situation.

Software under active development evolves over time as bugs are fixed and new features are added. Simply releasing every change as soon as it's finished has a high potential of causing chaos. To help keep things simple, changes are usually bundled into a known good build and released together. However, since there are now multiple releases of the same piece of software, it becomes important to know what features and bugs are present in any given release. To distinguish these releases, software teams use various versioning schemes to tag their releases so they can easily communicate to their users what to expect in any given release.

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We continue our conversation on designing Asset Twins by covering each of the 4 areas - Asset Templates, Asset Library, Attributes, and Enterprise Calculations - in more detail. For an overview of the AssetHub Asset Twin design approach, check out Part 1 here.

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In Sameer’s blog, the AssetHub Primer, he describes how AssetHub connects to real-time, design, and other operationally relevant systems to aggregate data and build Asset Twins that solve operational challenges.

This blog will explore how we CONNECT to producing systems, and ingest the volume and variety of data using agents and APIs.

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Today we’re announcing the Aluminum release of Element AssetHub. We’re constantly updating our product to reflect the latest learnings working with our customers. Some of you may know that we’ve been tracking each release using a name from the periodic table of elements. With each release as a new atomic number, we give birth to a new Element (Pop Quiz: What is the atomic number of Aluminum? Find out here.).

The Aluminum release adds new features to Asset Explorer. Asset Explorer offers operational teams an easy way to build and explore hierarchies of asset data and is a core function of Element AssetHub. Hierarchies allow different data consumers to view information about the relationships between data in a way that makes sense to them. For example, what’s good for the reliability engineer who wants a hierarchy of target equipment, won’t work for the process engineer who needs to see the data across multiple units within an overall process. If you’d like more detail on what Element AssetHub can do within your organization, read our primer.

Anyhow, back to the new features:

• Revamped UI
• Improved scalability
• Private hierarchies

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In a prior blog post, I spoke about Element AssetHub at a high level, explaining the need for Asset Twins and why we need to CONNECT to existing data sources, MANAGE the building and operationalizing of Asset Twins, and easily SHARE the data about these Asset Twins so they can be used for a multitude of use cases.

One of the most critical pieces of this process is designing the right Asset Twin. Without the right operational data forming a consistent data model of what your instrumentation, equipment, and/or processes, you’ll be hamstrung to perform simple comparisons, let alone wide scale advanced analytical projects.

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