Alexey Timin

The MQTT protocol is an easy way to connect sensors, machines, robots, and other IoT data sources to applications. Some MQTT brokers can persist messages for a short time, but long-term history, retention policies, and efficient querying usually belong in a time series database.

There are many databases available for storing MQTT data, but if your payloads include JSON telemetry, images, vibration samples, protobuf messages, or other blob-like data, ReductStore is a good fit. It is designed for time-stamped unstructured data at the edge and supports labels for filtering, querying, and replication.

In previous MQTT tutorials, we used Rust, Python, or Node.js code to subscribe to MQTT topics and write records to ReductStore. This tutorial uses a different approach: ReductBridge subscribes to MQTT, extracts labels from payloads, and forwards data to ReductStore using only a TOML configuration file.

Grafana is a powerful tool for visualizing time-series data, and it is widely used for monitoring and analysis. However, it does not natively understand robotics data formats, such as ROS 2 messages, since they are usually stored in binary formats (e.g., CDR). ReductStore's flexible query engine and extension system can bridge this gap. With the ReductROS extension, you can extract ROS 2 messages as JSON directly in Grafana queries. This enables you to build rich dashboards and alerts on your robotics data without preprocessing it into a different format.

Hello, everyone!

Starting with ReductStore v1.19, we are changing how we license and package the project. From this version onward, ReductStore is split into two editions: ReductStore Core and ReductStore Pro.