Industrial MQTT topic design: names, payloads and data contracts
Design a stable telemetry namespace with identity, timestamps, units, quality and schema ownership before connecting dashboards and consumers.
Source timestamp
The time associated with sampling or producing a value at its source.
Source time differs from gateway receipt, broker delivery and archive insertion. Preserve the distinction and define clock synchronization, time representation and stale thresholds. Republishing a cached reading must not invent a new source sample. Include the boundary in the industrial data contract.
See also: Industrial data contract · Historian
Use the concept: Industrial data connectivity: from register to consumer · Industrial data contract template
In depth
Industrial historian tag naming: a guide that survives the next integration
Asset hierarchy, units, quality, timestamps, metadata, and versioning patterns for process data that engineers can still understand years later.
Historian sampling and deadband: budget storage without losing events
Estimate raw historian volume, distinguish acquisition from storage filtering, and validate compression against the signals and events that matter.