diff --git a/src/_includes/layouts/use-case.njk b/src/_includes/layouts/use-case.njk
index d3a0372a73..edcb7c0171 100644
--- a/src/_includes/layouts/use-case.njk
+++ b/src/_includes/layouts/use-case.njk
@@ -9,10 +9,33 @@ sitemapPriority: 0.7
problem hero sub-headline (the pain in one line)
customerPain { heading, intro[], cards[ {icon,title,detail} ] }
outcomeFirst { heading, intro, dimensions[ {label,title,detail} ] }
+ howItWorks { heading, intro, designPattern{}, diagram{}, pieces[], architecture, docsCta{} }
whyItMatters { heading, intro, points[ {title,detail} ] }
competition { heading, intro, traps[ {label,title,detail} ] }
comparison { without[ {title,detail} ], with[ {title,detail} ] }
+ howItWorks answers "how does FlowFuse build this", which the pain, outcome
+ and comparison blocks deliberately do not. It is the bridge from the
+ marketing narrative into the product docs, so keep it high level here and
+ push every detail into a docs link.
+
+ designPattern { kind, name, detail, docsUrl }
+ kind is the pattern family, e.g. "Hardware pattern" or
+ "Software pattern". name is the specific pattern chosen
+ for this use case.
+ diagram { src, alt, caption, width, height, placeholder }
+ End-to-end architecture drawing. src may be a placeholder
+ while the real diagram is commissioned; set
+ diagram.placeholder to true to render the placeholder
+ treatment and keep it visibly unfinished. width/height
+ default to 1200x630 and only exist to reserve the box, so
+ override them when the real asset is a different shape.
+ pieces [ {icon, title, detail, docsUrl} ]
+ The problem broken into the individual components that get
+ built. Order them the way you would build them.
+ architecture slug of a /use-cases/ architecture page this sits on
+ docsCta { label, url }
+
Legacy fall-back front-matter (simple skeleton, still supported):
gap[], workflow[], outcomes[]
@@ -23,11 +46,17 @@ sitemapPriority: 0.7
{% set nav = [] %}
{% if customerPain %}{% set nav = nav.concat([{ id: "customer-pain", label: "Customer Pain" }]) %}{% endif %}
{% if outcomeFirst %}{% set nav = nav.concat([{ id: "outcome-first", label: "Outcome First" }]) %}{% endif %}
+{% if howItWorks %}{% set nav = nav.concat([{ id: "how-it-works", label: "How It Works" }]) %}{% endif %}
{% if whyItMatters %}{% set nav = nav.concat([{ id: "why-it-matters", label: "Why It Matters" }]) %}{% endif %}
{% if competition %}{% set nav = nav.concat([{ id: "competition", label: "Why Off-the-Shelf Fails" }]) %}{% endif %}
{% if comparison %}{% set nav = nav.concat([{ id: "with-without", label: "With / Without FlowFuse" }]) %}{% endif %}
{% if aiBuildLayer %}{% set nav = nav.concat([{ id: "ai-build-layer", label: "Build It With AI" }]) %}{% endif %}
+{# --- section eyebrow numbers, derived from nav so they cannot drift ---
+ Pages omit blocks freely, so a hardcoded "03" desyncs from the nav as soon
+ as an earlier block is missing. Look the number up instead. #}
+{% macro secNum(id) %}{%- for item in nav -%}{%- if item.id == id -%}{%- if loop.index < 10 -%}0{%- endif -%}{{ loop.index }}{%- endif -%}{%- endfor -%}{% endmacro %}
+
-
01 · Customer pain
+
{{ secNum("customer-pain") }} · Customer pain
{{ customerPain.heading }}
{% for paragraph in customerPain.intro %}
@@ -94,11 +123,11 @@ sitemapPriority: 0.7
{% if outcomeFirst %}
-
02 · Outcome first
+
{{ secNum("outcome-first") }} · Outcome first
{{ outcomeFirst.heading }}
{{ outcomeFirst.intro }}
@@ -114,13 +143,103 @@ sitemapPriority: 0.7
{% endif %}
+ {% if howItWorks %}
+
+
+
+
{{ secNum("how-it-works") }} · How it works
+
{{ howItWorks.heading or "How FlowFuse builds this" }}
+ {# width/height are here to reserve the box before the image
+ arrives; without them "h-auto" collapses the figure to
+ zero and the whole section below it jumps on load. #}
+
+
+ {% if howItWorks.diagram.caption or howItWorks.diagram.placeholder %}
+ {% if howItWorks.diagram.placeholder %}Placeholder diagram, pending art request. {% endif %}{{ howItWorks.diagram.caption }}
+ {% endif %}
+
+ {% endif %}
+
+ {% if howItWorks.pieces %}
+
{{ howItWorks.piecesHeading or "The individual pieces" }}
+
+ {% for piece in howItWorks.pieces %}
+
+
+
+ {% include "components/icons/" + piece.icon + ".svg" %}
+
{{ secNum("why-it-matters") }} · Why this is important
{{ whyItMatters.heading }}
{{ whyItMatters.intro }}
@@ -140,11 +259,11 @@ sitemapPriority: 0.7
{% if competition %}
-
04 · Why off-the-shelf doesn't work
+
{{ secNum("competition") }} · Why off-the-shelf doesn't work
{{ competition.heading }}
{{ competition.intro }}
@@ -165,11 +284,11 @@ sitemapPriority: 0.7
{% if comparison %}
-
05 · With / without FlowFuse
+
{{ secNum("with-without") }} · With / without FlowFuse
Without FlowFuse
@@ -206,11 +325,11 @@ sitemapPriority: 0.7
{% if aiBuildLayer %}
-
06 · Build it with AI
+
{{ secNum("ai-build-layer") }} · Build it with AI
{{ aiBuildLayer.heading or "From described to deployed, with the FlowFuse Expert" }}
{{ aiBuildLayer.intro }}
diff --git a/src/index.njk b/src/index.njk
index b7f03ee6c6..62b589cd54 100644
--- a/src/index.njk
+++ b/src/index.njk
@@ -88,6 +88,7 @@ operationalSystem:
- name: "Operational Data Pipelines"
description: "Structured controller data flows, diagnostics, and routing."
- name: "System Diagnostics"
+ url: "/use-cases/system-diagnostics/"
description: "Error tracking and root cause analysis across deployed applications."
meta:
faq:
diff --git a/src/use-cases/production-monitoring.njk b/src/use-cases/production-monitoring.njk
index 5086a4a875..8dfbc56b0e 100644
--- a/src/use-cases/production-monitoring.njk
+++ b/src/use-cases/production-monitoring.njk
@@ -7,6 +7,44 @@ problem: "Your operation is running. You just can't see it clearly enough, until
industries: ["automotive", "food-beverage", "life-sciences", "aviation-aerospace", "aerospace-components", "renewables", "semiconductors", "electronics-appliances"]
values: ["production-performance"]
+howItWorks:
+ heading: "How FlowFuse builds production monitoring."
+ intro: "Production monitoring is not one app you install. It is a handful of pieces you define once and then replicate. This is how the problem breaks down, and which FlowFuse pattern carries it across every line and site."
+ designPattern:
+ kind: "Hardware pattern"
+ name: "Pipeline plus environment variables"
+ detail: "The monitoring application is built once and distributed to every line by a DevOps pipeline. Everything site-specific, tag addresses, line names, shift boundaries, lives in environment variables instead of inside the flows, so the same snapshot runs everywhere without an edit."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/user/devops-pipelines/"
+ diagram:
+ placeholder: true
+ src: "https://placehold.co/1200x630/eef2ff/4338ca?text=Production+Monitoring+Architecture"
+ alt: "End-to-end architecture for production monitoring: PLCs and machines feeding edge instances, publishing to a broker and historian, with role-specific dashboards on top and a pipeline distributing the application across sites."
+ caption: "Machines and PLCs into edge instances, out over MQTT into your historian, role-specific dashboards on top, and one pipeline distributing the whole application across every line."
+ pieces:
+ - icon: "queue-list"
+ title: "Define the data model"
+ detail: "Name the equipment hierarchy and tag structure first: site, line, cell, signal. Every later piece depends on it, and this is exactly the part an off-the-shelf tool decides for you."
+ - icon: "chart"
+ title: "Derive the metrics"
+ detail: "Counts, cycle times, downtime reasons and OEE are calculated from the model rather than read off a machine. The logic sits in Node-RED flows your own team can read and change."
+ - icon: "device-agent"
+ title: "Collect at the edge"
+ detail: "The Device Agent runs an instance on existing edge hardware and speaks OPC-UA, Modbus, S7 or MQTT to whatever is already on the floor."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/device-agent/introduction/"
+ - icon: "arrows-right-left"
+ title: "Publish and store"
+ detail: "Contextualized data leaves the edge on a stable topic structure and lands in your historian or database. The schema and the storage stay yours."
+ - icon: "dashboard"
+ title: "Visualize per role"
+ detail: "A line view for the supervisor, trend detail for the maintenance engineer, a roll-up for the plant manager. FlowFuse Dashboard builds all three from the same data."
+ - icon: "rectangle-stack"
+ title: "Replicate across sites"
+ detail: "Snapshot the working application and let the pipeline push it to every other line, with each site's specifics supplied by environment variables."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/user/envvar/"
+ docsCta:
+ label: "Read the pipeline docs"
+ url: "/docs/user/devops-pipelines/"
+
aiBuildLayer:
intro: "The FlowFuse Expert works on this use case with you: describe the monitoring you need and get a working starting flow, then query what it captures in plain language."
steps:
diff --git a/src/use-cases/shop-floor-communication.njk b/src/use-cases/shop-floor-communication.njk
index 070eede175..a1a8645826 100644
--- a/src/use-cases/shop-floor-communication.njk
+++ b/src/use-cases/shop-floor-communication.njk
@@ -6,7 +6,44 @@ meta:
problem: "The line stopped four minutes ago. The person who can fix it will find out when someone walks over."
industries: ["automotive", "food-beverage", "aviation-aerospace", "electronics-appliances"]
values: ["labor-operational-efficiency"]
-architecture: "edge-connectivity"
+howItWorks:
+ heading: "How FlowFuse builds connected andon."
+ intro: "Getting an event to the right person is a small number of pieces, not a product. The routing logic is identical at every site; only the people, channels and shift patterns differ, and that is what decides the pattern."
+ designPattern:
+ kind: "Hardware pattern"
+ name: "Pipeline plus external configuration"
+ detail: "The routing and escalation flows are built once and distributed by pipeline. Who responds, on which channel, during which shift is read at runtime from a central configuration source, so a rota change or a new contact never requires a redeploy."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/user/devops-pipelines/"
+ diagram:
+ placeholder: true
+ src: "https://placehold.co/1200x630/eef2ff/4338ca?text=Shop+Floor+Communication+Architecture"
+ alt: "End-to-end architecture for connected andon: machine signals and operator call buttons into edge instances, routed against a central directory of roles and shifts, delivered to displays, team channels and phones, with acknowledgment timing recorded."
+ caption: "Machine signals and call buttons into edge instances, routed against a central directory of roles and shifts, out to displays, team channels and phones, with every acknowledgment timed."
+ pieces:
+ - icon: "bell-alert"
+ title: "Capture the event"
+ detail: "Machine signals, alarm bits and operator call buttons all become the same kind of event, collected by an edge instance next to the equipment."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/device-agent/introduction/"
+ - icon: "queue-list"
+ title: "Model the event"
+ detail: "Each event carries type, area, severity and the role that should respond. Routing decisions are made against that shape, not against a machine address."
+ - icon: "users"
+ title: "Keep the directory outside the flow"
+ detail: "Roles, contacts, channels and the shift calendar live in configuration rather than inside the flows, so the floor can change who responds without touching the application."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/user/envvar/"
+ - icon: "share"
+ title: "Deliver where people look"
+ detail: "The same event fans out to andon displays, team channels and phones, each with the context the recipient needs to act on it."
+ - icon: "clock"
+ title: "Acknowledge and escalate"
+ detail: "An unacknowledged event climbs the chain on a timer. Nothing waits on someone happening to be free."
+ - icon: "circle-stack"
+ title: "Record the timing"
+ detail: "Event, notification and acknowledgment timestamps land in your database, which is what turns response time into a metric you can manage."
+ architecture: "edge-connectivity"
+ docsCta:
+ label: "Read the pipeline docs"
+ url: "/docs/user/devops-pipelines/"
customerPain:
heading: "Events travel at walking speed."
diff --git a/src/use-cases/system-diagnostics.njk b/src/use-cases/system-diagnostics.njk
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..6c547a8be6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/src/use-cases/system-diagnostics.njk
@@ -0,0 +1,138 @@
+---
+title: "System Diagnostics"
+meta:
+ title: "System Diagnostics | Use Cases | FlowFuse"
+ description: "Correlate signals across IT and OT systems to find out why things are slow, stuck or failing. Built on Node-RED, managed with FlowFuse."
+problem: "When production IT misbehaves, the evidence is scattered across five systems and the person who can read them is on another site."
+industries: ["automotive", "semiconductors"]
+values: ["asset-reliability"]
+
+howItWorks:
+ heading: "How FlowFuse builds system diagnostics."
+ intro: "Diagnostics is a small emitter inside every deployed application and one place that collects what they report. This is how it breaks down and which FlowFuse pattern carries it."
+ designPattern:
+ kind: "Software pattern"
+ name: "Packaged application"
+ detail: "The diagnostics application is self-contained and deployed once per team. What it collects from arrives via a shared emitter block that every other application already carries, so coverage grows without touching the collector."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/user/shared-library/"
+ diagram:
+ placeholder: true
+ src: "https://placehold.co/1200x630/eef2ff/4338ca?text=System+Diagnostics+Architecture"
+ alt: "End-to-end architecture for system diagnostics: a shared emitter block inside every deployed application reporting structured errors to one collector, correlated by application, site and time, with alerting and a triage view."
+ caption: "A shared emitter inside every deployed application, reporting structured errors to one collector, correlated by application, site and time."
+ pieces:
+ - icon: "puzzle-piece"
+ title: "One emitter block, everywhere"
+ detail: "A subflow from the team library that every application carries, so an error looks the same whichever site or team produced it."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/user/shared-library/"
+ - icon: "bug"
+ title: "Structure the error"
+ detail: "Application, site, instance, severity and cause as fields rather than a log line someone has to read."
+ - icon: "project-nodes"
+ title: "Report without opening ports"
+ detail: "Project nodes and the broker carry reports out of edge networks that allow no inbound access."
+ docsUrl: "/docs/user/projectnodes/"
+ - icon: "funnel"
+ title: "Correlate across the estate"
+ detail: "The same fault on nine sites is one problem, not nine tickets. Grouping is what turns noise into a root cause."
+ - icon: "bell-alert"
+ title: "Alert on what is new"
+ detail: "Route first occurrences and rate changes to the person who owns that application, not everything to everyone."
+ - icon: "screen"
+ title: "Give triage one view"
+ detail: "What is broken, where, since when and how often, so the person who can read it does not have to be on site."
+ architecture: "it-ot-middleware"
+ docsCta:
+ label: "Read the shared library docs"
+ url: "/docs/user/shared-library/"
+
+customerPain:
+ heading: "Symptoms everywhere, causes nowhere."
+ intro:
+ - "Scanners time out, interfaces queue up, a line slows for no visible reason. The cause sits somewhere between the network, the middleware, the application and the machine, and each has its own console."
+ - "Diagnosis means an expert manually joining logs, tag values and timestamps across systems that were never meant to be read together."
+ cards:
+ - icon: "bug"
+ title: "Intermittent faults defy snapshots"
+ detail: "The problem is gone by the time someone looks; without continuous correlated capture there is nothing to analyze."
+ - icon: "layers"
+ title: "Evidence split across stacks"
+ detail: "Network metrics, application logs, PLC states and device telemetry live in unconnected tools."
+ - icon: "users"
+ title: "Diagnosis depends on one person"
+ detail: "The engineer who can read all five systems is a single point of failure for every incident."
+ - icon: "clock"
+ title: "Slow hunts, long incidents"
+ detail: "Hours of manual log pulling while production runs degraded."
+ #placeholder: template copy for review, refine per Showcase
+
+outcomeFirst:
+ heading: "One place where the signals meet."
+ intro: "FlowFuse flows collect and correlate the relevant signals continuously: device telemetry, interface queues, log events and process markers, so the picture exists before anyone has to ask for it."
+ dimensions:
+ - label: "Operational"
+ title: "Continuous evidence capture"
+ detail: "The signals that matter are collected and time-aligned around the clock, catching intermittent faults in the act."
+ - label: "Organizational"
+ title: "Diagnosis without the hero engineer"
+ detail: "Correlated views let more people resolve more incidents without cross-system expertise."
+ - label: "Financial"
+ title: "Shorter degraded-mode running"
+ detail: "Faster root cause means less time producing slowly, badly, or not at all."
+
+whyItMatters:
+ heading: "Degraded is the most expensive mode."
+ intro: "Hard failures get attention; slow drips of latency and retries quietly cost more."
+ points:
+ - title: "Intermittent issues age into outages"
+ detail: "What flickers today fails on the worst possible shift. Continuous capture is the only way to catch it early."
+ - title: "Cross-system blindness doubles incident time"
+ detail: "Most diagnostic time is spent gathering evidence, not analyzing it."
+ - title: "Tribal diagnostic knowledge does not scale"
+ detail: "Documenting correlation logic in flows turns one expert's method into a team capability."
+
+competition:
+ heading: "Why the usual approaches stall."
+ intro: "Observability tooling stops at the IT boundary; OT tooling stops at the machine."
+ traps:
+ - label: "IT observability"
+ title: "APM suites never see the PLC"
+ detail: "Enterprise monitoring covers servers and services but has no view of device or process state."
+ - label: "Vendor diagnostics"
+ title: "Every system diagnoses only itself"
+ detail: "Each console is right and none of them answer the cross-system question."
+ - label: "Manual forensics"
+ title: "Log pulls after the fact"
+ detail: "Evidence assembled per incident, too late for intermittent faults."
+
+comparison:
+ without:
+ - title: "Evidence gathered per incident"
+ detail: "Manual log pulls across systems, hours after the symptom."
+ - title: "One expert on the critical path"
+ detail: "Incidents queue behind a single person's availability."
+ - title: "Intermittent faults stay unsolved"
+ detail: "No continuous capture, no pattern, no fix."
+ with:
+ - title: "Signals correlated continuously"
+ detail: "Flows join telemetry, logs and process markers in real time."
+ - title: "Shared diagnostic views"
+ detail: "Dashboards anyone on the team can read and act on."
+ - title: "Patterns surface themselves"
+ detail: "Thresholds and trends flag recurring conditions before they escalate."
+
+aiBuildLayer:
+ intro: "The FlowFuse Expert works on this use case with you, from building collectors to querying what they capture."
+ steps:
+ - title: "Describe it, get a starting flow"
+ detail: "Tell the Expert which systems to watch; it assembles a collection and correlation starting flow. Currently in open beta on FlowFuse Cloud."
+ - title: "Ask questions in plain language"
+ detail: "Expose captured diagnostics through MCP tools and query them with Expert's Insights mode (beta): 'what changed before the scanners slowed down?'"
+ - title: "Own and adapt what you built"
+ detail: "The flow explainer documents collection logic, so the diagnostic method survives team changes."
+ note: "AI capabilities noted as beta are in open beta on FlowFuse Cloud at time of writing. Placeholder template copy for internal review."
+
+closingCta:
+ heading: "Stop diagnosing by archaeology"
+ description: "Talk to an expert about cross-system diagnostics, or wire your first correlated view today."
+---
+