OpenGate architecture

OpenGate Architecture Overview

OpenGate’s architecture is designed to be modular, scalable, and highly interoperable, making it ideal for managing complex IoT and IIoT ecosystems. Here’s a technical breakdown of its core components and how they interact:

From the OpenGate architecture perspective we like to talk about a journey from south to north, where south are devices or monitored entities and where north is the OpenGate IoT Platform and its capabilities. The following sections go deeper in each component

1. Core SBI (Southbound Interface)

This layer comprises sensors, actuators, and gateways in the field or the Edge. Devices communicate via various protocols like: Sigfox, LoRa, NB‑IoT, Modbus, SCADA, or MQTT—feeding data into the platform through the connector factory. On-site, its posible to deploy the OpenGate Device Agent (ODA) which runs lightweight edge processing: data collection, normalization, command execution, and optional AI capabilities. This local computation reduces latency and supports autonomy for critical IIoT solutions and allows also to communicate no IP based protocols like Zigbee, RS-232, RS-485, and other, to OpenGate.

🏗️ Smart Metering devices

As part of the amplía))) commercial strategy, for the last years our tech team works harder to integrate different Smart Metering Manufacturers protocols and devices. The following table resumes the current integrated manufacturers:

NOTE: cf(x) means that this manufacturer is integrated using OpenGate Connector Functions

IMPORTANT : The devices on the table are the most used devices by our customers and new devices can be integrated using the standard ConnectorFunctions capabilities or through our professional services. You just need to ask us.

2. Connector Factory & Network Connectivity Layer

From the Network connectivity, secure transport of data from edge to cloud is managed here. OpenGate supports multiple network and communication channels including SIM-based networks for NB‑IoT and LTE-M, LPWAN (Sigfox, LoRa), and IP protocols (HTTP, MQTT, CoAP). This layer ensures encrypted, bi-directional connectivity, with VPNs (as special request), firewalling, load balancing, and SIM/LPWAN lifecycle management. This SIM lifelcycle management is integrated as part of the OpenGate IoT Platform capabilities thanks to our mobile communications providers connectors like kite.

🔌 Integration Without Limits

OpenGate’s Connector Factory is a cornerstone feature designed to simplify and accelerate integrations in complex IoT ecosystems. It empowers organizations to seamlessly connect external systems, ML/AI pipelines, device fleets, communications services, and more—without needing extensive coding efforts. This layer offers a Plug and play with pre-built connectors for critical systems and services:

• SIM / LPWAN management as mention before, via our mobile communication providers connectors, fully integrated with mobile provider networks—simplifying device provisioning and subscription monitoring
• Industrial gateways & protocols, including HTTP, MQTT, CoAP, Modbus, and other protocols, facilitating smooth data ingestion from field hardware
• Enterprise visibility through BI, ERP, CRM, and cloud applications, thanks to robust HTTP connectors that break down data siloes instantly and allows you to centralize and enrich data gathered in OpenGate or send to another of your business core services

These connectors guarantee secure, two-way communication and are configured visually via the OpenGate UX layer, GUI Web Console

🛠️ Connector Functions

When out-of-the-box doesn’t cut it, Connector Functions - cf(x) let you tailor data flows in minutes using simple JavaScript:

1. Define criteria—select which messages should trigger your function.
2. Write logic—parse, enrich, transform, filter, or redirect data to external systems or devices.
3. Test & deploy—switch effortlessly between Disabled, Test, or Production modes.
4. Reuse and evolve—import/export configurations or access centrally managed catalog APIs to clone and maintain across environments

📈 Why this Makes the Difference

• Speed-to-market: Achieve real-time integrations in hours, not weeks, using pre-built connectors
• Custom-savvy: Craft advanced data workflows and transformations with minimal development effort and directly from web console
• Centralized integration management: Visualize and control every connector (both standard integrations and Connector Functions) in a unified admin interface
• Reusability & deployment consistency: Enable, disable, clone, or update your connector functions with a few clicks, reducing manual errors and enforcement friction. Ideal for CI/CD pipelines and ensuring replicable, version-controlled deployments

3. Core Platform

The OpenGate Core is the brain of the OpenGate IoT platform, and it’s designed to handle the full lifecycle of connected assets for your solution. In short, OpenGate Core is particularly well-suited for organizations that need end-to-end control, real-time bidirectional response and broad device compatibility without being locked into a single vendor or cloud provider. Its main capabilities are organized in different areas as the next diagram shows:

📦 Data Modeling & Storage

Your entities, your data and your own way. OpenGate offers the posibility to adjust the data collected to your needs and desirable data structure:

• Data Modeling: Design flexible schemas for your devices and assets, defining entity types and specific types, data streams, and metadata ensuring structured, consistent data throughout the lifecycle. Use our predefined catalog or create your own
• Collection Data Lake: Ingest high-volume data in real time into a robust Data Lake organized using your data models and work with this raw real-time information to explore your entities data
• Time Series and Data Sets: Use built-in tools to filter, aggregate, and construct time bucket based “Time Series” for your entities, and Create “Data Sets” for your entities based on the data collected for a custom data view of your entities status information. Use this data structures to build custom dashboards using the OpenGate widgets catalog

This capabilities enable efficient storage and retrieval of historical data with minimal effort, reducing overhead and enhancing analytics readiness.

⚙️ Provisioning & Entity Identification

Tools to help you to populate your devices and digital assets:

• Provision tools & Provision Functions: Quickly onboard devices—individually using guided UI flows or custom JavaScript functions to automate validation, multi-entity creation, and configuration steps using low-code javascript powered capabilities.
• Entity Identification Service: Automatically generate and assign unique IDs to each device or entity, ensuring reliable tracking and simplified maintenance and detect differences between provisioned and collected data automatically.
• Entity types out-of-the-box: Build relationships and define detailed digital twins of your entities by using our devices and assets, and collect the communication modules information using our subscriptio and subscriber entity types.

Thanks to this tools, you can reduces manual errors, accelerates deployment, and maintains clean inventories even at industrial scale.

⚙️ Operations Engine

OpenGate’s Operations Engine empowers you to automate essential device and asset unitary or massive operations with full control and visibility:

• Schedule remote tasks like firmware updates, diagnostics, and routine checks
• Trigger operations on-demand (e.g., reboot a device, collect logs) or schedule them
• Coordinate custom multi-step workflows tied to asset lifecycles
• Create your own operations wizards directly from the OpenGate web console using JSON schema forms

The Operations Engine enables safe, repeatable actions across fleets without manual intervention, supported by execution logs and retry mechanisms for unitary or masive operations.

🧩 Rules Engine

Craft intelligent, real-time automation using the powerfull OpenGate Rules Engine:

• Easy Mode GUI: Build rules using our conditional logic visually (“if-this-then-that”) without coding expertise
• Advances Low-code GUI: Write advanced rules with custom processing, filters, and business logic using our predefined functions catalog or crafting your own. Start from scratch or use a basic catalog rule as template to build your own
• Instant triggers and alerts: Respond to anomalies, thresholds, or patterns as they happen and trigger alerts, notifications or operations from the Operations Engine as response

These capabilities offers adaptive, responsive IoT automation, combining ease of use with full developer control for customizations.

🔁 Forwarders

Ensure data, events, and alerts flow seamlessly into your enterprise systems or enrich your OpenGate Data:

• Bidirectional communication with third-parties and services
• Route information from data streams or rule outputs to external systems (ERP, BI, CRM, custom APIs)
• Choose sync or async delivery, including JSON, XML, or custom formats
• Configure via GUI or code for flexible integration needs

We want OpenGate to be Your MultiTool but sometimes you need something else, so the forwarders offers you end-to-end operational workflows, eliminating the need for separate middleware and keeping business data in sync.

4. OpenGate UX Web Console

OpenGate’s web console is meticulously crafted to balance simplicity for end-users with depth for technical teams, offering a unified interface to manage devices, data, rules, analytics, and integrations, all without deep technical training and ensuring your User Experience.

Use the powerful tools from the OpenGate’s web console to build your own IIoT solution using a predefined catalog with more than 50 customizable widgets to create the specific views for your users or your needs and take advantage of the following capabilities:

🎛️ Customizable Workspaces & Dashboards

• Select from different look and feels, upload your logos and customize the OpenGate appeareance to meet your brand requirements
• Create your own workspaces tailored for specific needs or roles such as operators, analysts, or admins
• Use +50 customizable widgets to build your dashboards like charts, maps, tables, and entity lists to help you visualize the IoT ecosystem
• Personalize your dashboards with filters, layouts, refresh intervals, and interactive controls
• Use low-code snippets to make visual adjustments and visualization conditional rules depending on data values
• Share your workspaces and dashboards within your organization with user groups o specific users
• Integrate new features from external resources thanks to the custom menu areas using our secure iFrame functionality

🧭 Guided Wizards & Low-Code Tools

• Step-by-step wizards guide users through complex tasks like creating dashboards, provisioning devices, and defining rules—no coding needed
• Low-code tools let technical staff to configure advanced tasks, rules and customizarions using javascript

🔒 Role-Based Access

• Centralized GUI for user & role management, enforcing permissions across the platform
• Define access policies for each workspace, feature, or dataset—ensuring data confidentiality and auditability
• Create your own roles to define specifically who do what
• Create your own multi-tenant organization to manage diferent levels or verticals from thw same OpenGate organizarion

⚙️ Operational & Provisioning Interfaces

• Real-time device inventory with status indicators, clickable controls, and firmware/update scheduling from a unified screen
• Bulk operations managed through intuitive panels: filter, select, and apply actions to vast fleets effortlessly

↔️ Integration & Forwarding Configuration

• Built-in UI elements to configure Connector Functions, Forwarders, and API endpoints—fully managed via intuitive dialogs
• View logs and status of data forwarding and rule executions directly in the console

🧩 Developer-Friendly Debugging & Visualization

• Live logs and data previews within each widget and rule/connector configuration
• Test and debug Connector Functions or Rules directly in the interface before going to production

🎮 OpenGate Device Emulator

The Device Emulator is an essential tool within the OpenGate UX, enabling you to emulate device behavior instantly. This is a perfect tool for testing integrations, connector functions and rules, or debugging setups, or showcasing the platform without physical hardware and without additional tools. This gives you:

• Simulate data flows without connecting real devices which is ideal for development teams, QA, or demos
• Validate device provisioning and collection, rule triggers, forwarding logic, and dashboard visualizations
• Validate complex workflows and simulate device operation responses
• Accelerate your development by eliminating hardware procurement delays and issues by simulating device behavior in the cloud

5. Artificial Intelligence

OpenGate’s AI layer brings advanced analytics and machine learning directly into the platform core, enabling seamless data-driven insights and automated decision-making. It’s designed for both data scientists and developers as well as operations teams. Key components include:

🐍 OpenGate Data Py

Our opengate-data is OpenGate’s official Python client library that simplifies data interaction across the platform:

• 📦 Data extraction & injection: Pull collections, timeseries data, DataSets, and entities directly into Python workflows and reinyect the result data again in OpenGate
• 💡 Perfect for notebooks: Integrates with Jupyter (Data Lab) for data exploration, visualization, and other tasks
• ⚙️ API-first approach: Easy full support for REST-based authentication, querying, and batch operations in Python

📓 OpenGate Data Lab

OpenGate Data Lab embeds Jupyter Notebooks into the platform with features like:

• Notebook execution: Run notebooks manually or on a schedule as part of your data pipelines or workflows
• Full Python ecosystem: Support for scientific libraries like NumPy or Pandas
• Operational workflows: Combine data processing and analytics in a single interface that live within OpenGate using Opengate Data Py library

🏭 AI Model Factory

Our “AI Model Factory” is the next-gen module for end-to-end AI lifecycle within OpenGate featuring:

• Pipeline orchestration: Design sequences involving data extraction, transformation, training and inference
• Multi-format model support: Deploy and serve models for real-time predictions
• Training & retraining: Include model training pipelines to continuously update models with fresh data
• Inference services: Deploy models as services callable from the OpenGate Rules Engine for real-time decision-making

This fully integrated setup lets you build, train, serve, and manage AI models (traditional or ML models) directly within your IIoT environment

🔄 Cross-Cutting Concerns

Across all layers, OpenGate enforces:

• Security: Encryption at rest/in transit, device integrity checks, tenant isolation, authentication, and auditing.
• Scalability & Resilience: Containerized microservices, load balancing, auto-scaling, and fault tolerance.
• Monitoring & Logging: Central observability stack with metrics, tracing, alerting, and logs.
• Hybrid Deployment: Suitable for fully cloud, fully on-premise, or hybrid edge‑cloud orchestration including AI capabilities.