Replacing Amazon Monitron: CloudRail Supports Seamless Predictive Maintenance
To reduce unplanned downtime and maintenance costs, industrial manufacturers are increasingly relying on practices like predictive maintenance. Instead of following fixed maintenance plans that are based on schedules, predictive maintenance allows your team to proactively perform maintenance tasks based on actual equipment condition.
If your production site uses the Amazon Monitron system to monitor industrial equipment, analyze sensor data and forecast equipment failure as part of its predictive maintenance program, then you’ve likely heard the update: This machine learning (ML) service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) for industrial equipment condition monitoring is no longer available to new customers.
Existing Amazon Monitron customers will be able to purchase devices and use the service as normal. Amazon will continue to sell devices until July 2025 and honor its five-year device warranty, including service support. While AWS continues to invest in security, availability and performance improvements for Amazon Monitron, it does not plan to introduce new features.
As a result, many industrial environments may be looking for a new way to collect equipment data to enable things like condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, fault detection and asset management.
While this news from AWS may seem surprising, Belden’s CloudRail is an alternative opportunity to drive flexible, end-to-end equipment monitoring so you can continue to improve plant performance and scale as your needs change.
A retrofit solution for Amazon Monitron: Belden CloudRail
The CloudRail solution from Belden helps industrial companies retrofit legacy machines and equipment using IO-Link, an industrial communication standard that enables two-way communication between devices and control systems. CloudRail connects vibration sensors, temperature sensors and other types of sensors—30,000+ sensors in total—to streamline industrial data acquisition and transmission.
Because it offers seamless OT-to-cloud connectivity, CloudRail makes it fast and easy to connect contextualized OT data to the AWS cloud ecosystem. Within just a few minutes of setup, sensors effortlessly connect to AWS services like AWS IoT Core, AWS IoT SiteWise, and AWS IoT Greengrass V2 to streamline data collection, processing and analysis.
What Belden CloudRail brings to your plant
CloudRail moves data from the plant floor to your smart factory application.
Supporting different protocols and standards, such as OPC UA and Modbus, CloudRail works with modern equipment as well as existing machinery so you can optimize the system investments you’ve already made.
The result is a secure, reliable sensor-to-cloud system that is continuously monitored, maintained and updated to support plant operations today and in the future. And because data is normalized locally at the edge and sent in a consumable format with CloudRail, it prevents siloes that hinder access to the comprehensive insights needed to improve efficiency across your plant.
Notable Belden CloudRail features
There are a few Belden CloudRail features we want you to know about as you consider it as an alternative to Amazon Monitron:
- As a holistic, edge-to-cloud offering, Belden includes everything you need: cables, IO-Link Masters, switches, gateways and device management software.
- As a vendor-agnostic solution, it can support nearly any type of sensor from any manufacturer, including sensors that monitor vibration, temperature, pressure, energy use and more.
- CloudRail directly integrates with AWS IoT SiteWise to simplify data collection, storage, organization and monitoring of industrial equipment data. With AWS IoT SiteWise, you can use dashboards to visualize near real-time and historical equipment data, as well as compute industrial performance metrics. Using the centralized data, you can power analytics like BI reporting and machine learning (ML) models for optimizing operations. AWS IoT SiteWise can also be integrated with digital twin platforms like AWS IoT TwinMaker to centralize sensor data linked to twin entities.
- The CloudRail.Box Max device supports edge computing by providing native support for AWS IoT SiteWise Edge. It also uses AWS IoT Greengrass V2 to support local preprocessing and generate alerts.
Ready to make the switch?
If you’re searching for an alternative solution to Amazon Monitron, get in touch with Belden. We can help you seamlessly retrofit your Amazon Monitron devices to help you implement anomaly detection to keep your plant equipment running.
Related links:
- CloudRail Products
- Press Release - Belden Acquires CloudRail
- Choosing Industrial Edge Hardware Qualified to Work with AWS