Announcing Foxglove Edge Sites

Use Foxglove Data Platform to track and access your on-premises robotics data

Esther Weon ·

3 min read

Published February 17, 2023

Whether your robots operate in a warehouse, farm field, or garage, you can now use Foxglove Edge Sites to pull their data on-demand for analysis. Designed for resource-constrained environments, Edge Sites can help your robotics team safely store data on-premises before forwarding to the cloud.

What are Edge Sites?

Foxglove Data Platform provides a centralized place for your team to store and view data. Whether you ask Foxglove to host this data for you or manage it yourself in your own cloud, you can use the Data Platform API to access your data whenever and wherever you want – as long as you have reliable uptime and a persistent network connection.

In robotics development, however, it may be difficult to predict your network connectivity or bandwidth. Edge Sites mitigate these risks by being located on-site, close to where your fleet is physically operating.

With Edge Sites, your robots can now enjoy a much more direct and reliable path to store their recorded data. Your team can also buffer against fluctuating and unpredictable network resources by intelligently queuing data for cloud import, as connectivity and bandwidth become available. This ensures that all your data safely makes it to long-term storage, for further analysis.

Creating an Edge Site

As a Foxglove admin, sign in to your Foxglove account and add Edge Sites to your organization via the Settings page:

create Edge Site

Name your new Edge Site, and set a custom data retention policy for its contained recordings.

You can create an Edge Site for every location where your robots collect and store data, and configure all of them to upload their data on-demand to the same Primary Site.

Once you’ve finished installing your Edge Site release, you’re ready to add recordings to it. These edge recordings will appear on the Recordings page, with an “At edge” status:

status of recordings

Recordings with an “At edge” status live on one of your Edge Sites, but have not yet been imported (“Importing”) into your Primary Site (“Available”) for analysis.

From here, you can select an “At edge” recording to queue for importing to a Primary Site. Once it finishes "Importing" and becomes "Available", it will be become accessible from all Foxglove Data Platform API endpoints for streaming and analysis.

You can also use the Foxglove web console’s Timeline page to see your recordings in chronological order. Note that recordings at the edge will be grayed out, to denote that they must first be imported before you can access them:

timeline view

We hope Foxglove Edge Sites can empower your team to not only understand where your data lives, but also reliably get it from your robots and into your team's hands – regardless of the real-world obstacles.

Learn more

Foxglove Data Platform provides a comprehensive solution for managing robotics data across environments, so you can access your data whenever and wherever you need it. No matter your team’s resource constraints, regulatory restrictions, or data partitioning requirements, Foxglove Edge Sites make it easier than ever to dictate where your data lives and how it gets forwarded to the cloud for team-wide collaboration.

Be sure to check out the Foxglove Data Platform docs for more information about Primary Sites and Edge Sites. And as always, feel free to reach out to us in our Slack community to ask questions, give feedback, and make feature requests.