Good question! Grafana is often reached for as a solution here, but it has some limitations (Note: most of these limitations are completely logical when you think of Grafana's target use case, server and software monitoring):
- advanced transformations are impossible or at a minimum unwieldy, especially for users who are not comfortable in e.g. SQL
- not optimized for advanced HMI for complex systems that move through multiple states. Software systems like to decompose into smaller, modular systems... the physical world does not cater to these abstractions
- It focuses on real-time and recent data. Our customers want to pore over and compare data for years after it is recorded.
- Lack of vertical integration with our customers data sources
The most fulfilling moments in my career have been those delivering tools that are as high quality as what I use every day as a software engineer, but to other disciplines. Nominal is doing exactly that, specifically for electrical, mechanical, and aerospace engineers who are building next generation, humanity-propelling systems. We bring expertise in data infrastructure & world-class UI design to unbelievably hard-working teams, who are often neglected by the software industry. (To be fair, due to significant technical challenges, challenges that we are excited to tackle head on!)
Everyone here is familiar with the stack of software-focused CI/CD, infrastructure, application monitoring, and data pipeline technologies. All of these are square pegs in round holes for our users, and the process of duct-taping them together in a fast-moving, multidisciplinary hardware engineering organization leads to a lot of wasted time and frustration. A holistic platform that caters to our users' workflows will massively accelerate the important developments that we as a society need, and Nominal is excited to be a tide that lifts all boats.
We work on complex multi-modal data problems, building interfaces to the ever-changing landscape of data modeling, storage, and analysis technologies, and helping people determine important performance characteristics of their systems in minutes, not days (and soon, in sub-second time frames!). Our users build advanced energy systems, operate next-generation transportation platforms, and deploy assets to space.
If you want to apply your hard-earned software abilities to our customers... reach out!
Although, from reading the docs, a lot of the products that I'm interested are still "Coming Soon" (confusingly a different verbiage but identical in meaning to "Private Beta"?):
- Transactions
- Other data-powered products
- advanced transformations are impossible or at a minimum unwieldy, especially for users who are not comfortable in e.g. SQL
- not optimized for advanced HMI for complex systems that move through multiple states. Software systems like to decompose into smaller, modular systems... the physical world does not cater to these abstractions
- It focuses on real-time and recent data. Our customers want to pore over and compare data for years after it is recorded.
- Lack of vertical integration with our customers data sources