I connected Factorio to an an external production monitor

[mediocretes]

I work on a monitoring product called Instrumental, and we were brainstorming weird things we could connect to our product to show off its flexibility. I saw the opportunity to play Factorio at work and jumped right on it. I know this is a little self-promotey, but it also includes a minimum mod skeleton tutorial, if you just want to plug your own weird stuff into the game.

https://medium.com/expected-behavior/in ... 5d63fecdd0

Let me know if you have questions, or if you feel like this is inappropriate for the forum.

[TruePikachu]

I'm no moderator, but I feel this is on the good side of the borderline. Heck, the blog post could potentially get us more players, and you saying what you did could give other players ideas for other ways to integrate Factorio with professional-level analysis tools they might have lying around (even if it isn't your product in particular).

[mediocretes]

I'm no moderator, but I feel this is on the good side of the borderline. Heck, the blog post could potentially get us more players, and you saying what you did could give other players ideas for other ways to integrate Factorio with professional-level analysis tools they might have lying around (even if it isn't your product in particular).

Thanks! There are a lot of great tools in this space, and I think the technique I used could apply to most of them. Not sure what Splunk would make of eating Factorio logs, but I'm sure it would make something.

[TruePikachu]

I'm actually curious what would happen if I did weird parametric graphs of some of my production graphs now, e.g. putting copper smelting on X and green circuit fabrication on Y. Especially since some of these are definately related to each other, but on a time lag.

I have a copy of Logger Pro (intended for classroom experiment analysis, but it can take any CSV data set) sitting around, it's pretty easy to change around axes in there, and it's relatively simple to write a mod that dumps production data directly to a CSV. Not quite realtime data collection, but if I really felt like it I could code up something in C++ that interfaces Factorio with a serial port, code up a grapher+renderer for my Propeller microcontroller, and plug that into an old TV set we have.

[Koub]

[Koub] From time to time, I'm in front of a topic that has its place on this forum, but i'd be damned if I could find where it belonged. This is such a topic.
After a thorough reflexion, I feel the Spread the World subforum is best suited to host the thread, therefore I'm moving it.

[mediocretes]

Sounds reasonable to me, thanks!

[djeepp]

This type of stuff has been going around in my head since the day after I first played the game. I haven't quite figured out a good use case but what you came up with is really neat.

In my head, I saw it the other way around. How do I get useful enterprise IT functionality inside the game? Take a complex scenario like data protection across hundreds or thousands of environments, made up of different applications that hold different priorities, and are spread across many sites and geos. That stuff gets difficult to track very quickly and it doesn't take much to screw something up with the wrong command or clicking the wrong thing. Now, translate the scenario into a Factorio Megabase where you have multiple people working together, maintaining incredibly complicated and fragile environments.

There must be something there, but I can't quite put my finger on it. I'm glad there are others thinking in the same space.