Anyone who has built the software side of a connected product knows the integration job. The device keeps its readings and settings in one format and the gateway or cloud service wants those same values as rows in a SQL database. Somebody writes a converter. Then somebody has to keep that converter alive for as long as the device stays in the field, which for industrial equipment or embedded systems can easily be ten years. The converter has to handle offline periods, retries, out-of-order updates, and the device’s own data format changing over time.

Most dashboards ask the same few questions all day long: requests per endpoint, month-to-date usage for one customer, error rates by status code. The usual setup recounts raw rows from scratch on every refresh, or ships every row to a hosted analytics service that bills by the gigabyte. A dashboard that needs to answer quickly on demand either waits for a database query to finish, or pays for a service that stores everything.