.. _Introduction:

Introduction
============

Industrial Data Collector is an integration tool to:

* **Collect** data from OPC UA Servers;
* **Store** that data in the Local Storage and immediately **Forward** into the destination persistent storage. Currently it can forward data to:
  
  - Apache Kafka, including managed instances by Confluent and Redpanda
  - InfluxDB (versions 1.x and 2.x), 
  - Microsoft SQL Server
  - MQTT Brokers, such as HiveMQ, EMQX, Mosquito, and AWS, Azure, Google cloud platforms' MQTT endpoints,
  - MySQL database,  
  - TimescaleDB (PostgreSQL database optimized to store time-series data),
  - PostgreSQL,
  - Snowflake,
  - SQLite

This enables next steps to process collected data, such as:
 
* **Visualize** it, using `Grafana <https://www.grafana.com>`_ and its ``SimpleJson`` or ``Infinity`` data source plugins. In this case Industrial Data Collector can feed historical or real-time data via its  REST endpoint. It can fetch data directly from OPC UA Servers, or from the persistent storage where data was forwarded to before.

* **Analyze** stored in the persistent storage historical data. For example, when data is stored in SQL database, you can analyze data using standard SQL queries. 

Context diagram of the Industrial Data Collector follows below.

.. image:: images/idako/ContextDiagram.png

For more information on supported features, please refer the section :ref:`features`.