General Platform FAQ's

In this space, we will be posting general platform FAQ’s to help address more generic questions that often come up with customers who are utilizing the platform tools in Fuuz.

Q: What is an Industrial Intelligence Platform?

A: Fuuz is the first Industrial Intelligence Platform, the only platform in the market that supports the full dataOps pipeline including: 

1. connect: your devices, people, assets, software, databases, sensors, etc.

2. collect: access data across multiple domains, apply logic and add context to that data to create a single pane of glass.

3. store: using our own internal data storage (mongoDb) your data is stored securely in the cloud with no additional licensing required.

4. visualize: make screens, dashboards, reports, and more all within Fuuz.

5. analyze: use your data from Fuuz and your other systems to analyze your operational performance, optimize and improve.

6. find patterns: use our data flow designer to identify patterns using jsonata, plug in your favorite hosted python toolset to run ML and other libraries on your Fuuz data storage, connect your favorite LLM/LRM to our MCP Server.

7. report: build reports, share your data with BI tools like powerBi, tableu, domo and others using our pre-built connectors or our open http protocols and our built in graphql apis.

8. solve: use Fuuz to implement corrective actions to address shortcomings in your operations, enhance your master data, fix standards, improve discipline.

Monitoring & Reliability FAQ

System Monitoring

Q: How is the system monitored?

A: The Fuuz platform uses multiple layers of monitoring to ensure optimal performance:

Internal Infrastructure Monitoring: We use Datadog (or equiv.) internally for production platform monitoring, tracking service health, error rates, queue depth, and other critical metrics

Platform Monitoring Tools: Within the Fuuz platform, you can monitor your operations using:

1. Data Flow Metrics Dashboard: View execution metrics and performance data from your data flows
2. Data Flow Logs: Access detailed logs from data flow executions
3. Integration Request Logs: Monitor lower-level connection traffic through the integration system
   

Platform Status & Outages

Q: How do we find out about outages?

A: All platform outages and scheduled maintenance are communicated through our dedicated status page which you can subscribe to: https://status.fuuz.app/ 

Q: How do we find out about undelivered messages or other intermittent failures?

A: In Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS), the primary failures that require end-user attention are error responses from external systems. The Fuuz platform provides several tools to help you stay informed:

1. Custom Alarms: Use the data flow and notification systems to create customized alarms based on flow metrics and logs
2. Error Handling: Customize error handling logic in the data flow system to perform desired actions when failures occur (notifications, logs, rollbacks, etc.)
   

Performance Monitoring

Q: How do we monitor latency and queue sizes?

A: Performance monitoring is handled at multiple levels:

1. Platform-Level Monitoring: Queue depth, processing rates, and latencies within the platform are monitored via Datadog. The system automatically scales handlers to maintain optimal queue depth
2. Data Flow Latency: Total flow execution time is available as a metric in the data flow metrics system
3. External Request Latency: Tracked and displayed in the Integration Request Logs
   

DevOps Integration

Q: How do we connect this to DevOps systems to handle incidents, on-call, escalation, etc.?

A: The Fuuz platform offers flexible integration options for your DevOps workflows:

1. Direct Integration: Use the integration platform itself to connect to external systems such as Datadog or PagerDuty or Jira Operations
2. Custom Connectors: If a system doesn't have an available connector, we build custom connectors at no cost to you
3. Universal Connectivity: The general-purpose HTTP connector works with almost any API for immediate integration
   

Reliability & Outage Scenarios

Q: What works or doesn't work if internet is down?

A: The Fuuz platform is designed with redundancy and offline capabilities:

1. IPaaS Solution: The cloud-based IPaaS solution is unaffected by outages in your local internet connection
2. Plant Floor Apps: Will fall back to local-only mode, reading and writing to buffered storage on the edge
3. High Availability: The cloud platform uses replicated services across Availability Zones (AZs) and can tolerate the loss of any AZ or service replica
4. Disaster Recovery: In the event of a catastrophic AWS region outage, plant floor apps fall back to local-only mode, with data restoration available from nightly cross-region backups
   

Q: What works or doesn't work if the local instance  (Fuuz Gateway / OnPrem) is down?

A: Local instance functionality primarily affects Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and Warehouse Management System (WMS) operations:

1. Device Connectivity Impact: Plant floor device connectivity (PLC, SCADA) will be interrupted
2. Fallback Options: Depending on implementation, MES & WMS can fall back to cloud-based versions of control panels and inventory management (though without device connectivity)
   

Integration Capabilities

Q: What are the ingress options for data integrations with Fuuz using the Data Flow Designer?

A: Fuuz supports all standard integration data including REST APIs, SOAP, ODBC, FTP/SFTP, MQTT, Websockets (socket.io) & Webhooks. Beyond this, Fuuz supports Cloud to Cloud using our Fuuz.app environments; Fuuz supports Edge to Cloud using the Fuuz Gateway. In addition to these methods, due to our open architecture and API first design, you can bring your own tools either cloud or edge based when necessary to fill any gaps. For example, you may opt to use Kepware, Ignition, Litmus, Highbyte or others at the edge to collect data and then publish that data to Fuuz using any of the supported methods. In the cloud to cloud integrations using external tools like Boomi, Tibco, Celigo, Mulesoft, Zapier etc - are all compatible with our communication methods. These 3rd party tools are not required, that's the benefit of using Fuuz - often times these tools become obsolete with Fuuz deployments, however, there are times when you may need them for some obscure connector or driver.

Q: Can we use Fuuz to process EDI?

A: Absolutely! EDI is a 'standardized' format that can be translated a number of ways. Raw EDI, can be translated using our data flow designer, which has options for RAW to JSON translations using an API and libraries provided by EDINation. You can also construct your own translation and mappings, using Jsonata transforms in our data flow designer. Once translated to Json, whichever methods you prefer, you can utilize our 'data mapper' to connect elements from the translated EDI files, to your Fuuz data models OR directly into an outbound POST or GET api to another system - your ERP for example. The benefit of using Fuuz, is our data modeling capabilities, where you can manage aspects of EDI that other iPaaS tools do not support, such as validations, contextualizing and more. For example, you can use Fuuz data models to persist master data such as Item Codes, Ship Tos - and ensure the EDI is validated prior to attempting to load it into your ERP system. This provides 1 system of record and point of ingestion for this data to make managing it a breeze.

Q: What are the data egress options available in Fuuz?

A: There are multiple aspects to this:
1. Cloud iPaaS tools (aka Data Flows): HTTP requests to any external API, write to FTP servers, ODBC, SMTP, Webhooks, etc.

2. Edge (aka Device Gateway): Local HTTP/TCP servers, file folders, SQL servers, PLCs, MQTT Brokers, Native Industrial control drivers, Printers, etc.

3. Event Topics and data changes can also be subscribed to via websocket (socket.io) API

Q: Can we integrate Fuuz with our ERP system?

A: Yes! In fact, this is where Fuuz all began, as an iPaaS solution that was designed with IT best practices in mind. Over the years, we have replaced 1000's of Boomi, and Mulesoft integrations due to our robust platform architecture and 'batteries-included' infrastructure, monitoring, etc.

No matter what ERP system you are using, or considering using, we either have a pre-built connector for it, you can use standard protocols like HTTP, FTP, SOAP or we can build a connector for the use case. Once the connector is built, you only pay the annual fee for use of that connector; the engineering to develop it is included in the platform subscription. All you need to do is provide us with all the documentation on the requirements for the ERP systems interface. We have connectors for all major ERP systems, NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, Quickbooks, Plex, IFS, QAD, Acumatica, Infor and more. Again, even if there's no named connection, 99.9% of the time our HTTP connector does the trick for you on day 1.

Q: How do updates in our ERP system get noticed by Fuuz?

A: There are many options for this, depending on the client and the specific use cases/requirements. Here are just a few:

1. Your ERP system, often times has the ability to send outbound requests - these could trigger a webhook in Fuuz, which would intern indicate to Fuuz that something has changed and then execute a data flow.

2. If your ERP does not have outbound capabilities, you can set Fuuz up to query the ERP system occasionally (again, this is ERP dependent) to check for updates on data models "since" some past specified timeframe. For example, "Get all the new Items added Since 12 hours ago"; or "Get all Items updated within the last 12 hours". Data flows in Fuuz can be orchestrated via schedules that you control the frequency of using the 'flow schedules' module.

3. If your ERP can be configured to post data on data changes or user requests - you can post those directly to a Fuuz API (which could be a direct mutation using our GraphQL API, or it could be a data flow that you've created involving some more complex logic or transformations)

4. You can setup Request-Response flows in Fuuz, with UI for someone to trigger a process on demand using the click of the button. We do this frequently when the ERP system has concurrency, or transactional volume limitations to mitigate unnecessary costs for the client.

There are a number of ways this can be done, due to system limitations and lack of standards between ERP systems and other enterprise packages not built on modern web frameworks, we are unable to give more than general answers. For specific information, please submit a ticket with details of what system you want to integrate with and what your business process requirements are.

Support

Q: How do we get Support for our Fuuz system?

A: Several Options:

1. Use the built in "Help" feature in the upper right corner of your Fuuz App
   
2. Check our knowledge base for relevant information to help you out
   
3. If its outage related, check status.fuuz.app to make sure its Us and not You
4. Get in contact with your Fuuz deployment partner
   
5. Submit a ticket to Fuuz, if you're the system admin to support@fuuz.com
   
6. Check the knowledge base for relevant information
   

Q: Our App is behaving in a way we dont expect how do we get this resolved?

A: Contact the author of that application.

1. If you authored the application yourself, and your internal resources are unable to determine the cause of the issue - you can submit a billable ticket to support@fuuz.com 
   
2. If Fuuz authored the application for you, submit a ticket to support@fuuz.com
   
3. If a Partner of Fuuz authored the application for you, we suggest you reach out to that partner first
   

Enhancements and Improvements

Q: How do we get notified about enhancements or improvements to the system?

A: Fuuz posts monthly release notes into the Knowledge Base.

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