National Instruments releases SystemLink

SystemLink helps improve operational efficiency and decrease maintenance costs through a centralised interface for automating tasks such as software deployment, remote device configuration and system health performance monitoring.

Trends like the Industrial Internet of Things, 5G and the electrification of vehicles, coupled with existing realities like maintaining distributed legacy systems, are inspiring companies to seek new approaches to systems management. The push towards connected and centrally coordinated systems has transformed theories and pilot projects into large-scale, distributed deployments with impactful business returns. Companies derive these returns from the actionable, data-driven insights that help them maximise uptime, increase efficiency and drive future product innovation. At the same time, companies need to balance their adoption of new, connected technologies while preserving support for valuable legacy assets with long life cycles.

Systems that manage, maintain and extract insight from small-scale pilots or groups of systems are relatively straightforward to implement. However, attention now shifts toward the next challenge, which is scaling and managing large deployments, varying life cycle stages and distributed testers and nodes across entire plants, fabs and factories. This challenge includes tasks like remote software and system configuration as well as data management and performance monitoring, and applies to industries such as aerospace and defense, transportation and manufacturing. 

SystemLink enables engineers to connect, deploy, and manage distributed systems, both NI and third-party, through a centralised interface accessible from anywhere, making it possible for them to remotely configure and deploy software, monitor the health and performance of their equipment, manage alarms, and visualise application parameters. Additionally, engineers can automate the communication of data to customer-defined dashboards and remote operator interfaces.
“SystemLink substantially reduces the administration time necessary to deploy software and manage configurations on test systems,” said Daniel Huang, head of testing technology at Siemens AG. “This enables our engineering teams to focus on higher value tasks.”

To meet demands like testing higher complexity DUTs and shorter timeframes, engineers need tools tailored to their needs that they can efficiently use through their workflow, helping them to meet their exact application requirements. SystemLink is the latest addition to NI’s software-centric platform that features products tailored to needs within distinct stages of their workflow – products that have been adopted in whole or in part by more than 300,000 active users. With LabVIEW engineering system design software at its core and TestStand test management software handling overall execution, this workflow helps to improve the productivity of test and validation labs across many industries. Each piece of the workflow is also interoperable with third-party software to maximise code/IP reuse and draws on the LabVIEW Tools Network ecosystem of add-ons and tools for more application-specific requirements.