MQTT Sparkplug B

Sparkplug is an Eclipse specification that defines how industrial devices use MQTT: a fixed topic namespace, a Google Protocol Buffers payload, and birth and death messages so subscribers always know whether data is current. Version 3.0.0 was released in 2022.

Source checked3/3 values · 2026-10-25

Specification

2 sources

Transports	tcp
Architecture	publish subscribe
Encoding	protobuf
Standard body	Eclipse Foundation (Sparkplug Working Group)
Standard ref	Sparkplug 3.0.0

Study notes

Topic format: namespace/group_id/message_type/edge_node_id/[device_id], where namespace is spBv1.0 for Sparkplug B.
Message types: NBIRTH, NDEATH, DBIRTH, DDEATH, NDATA, DDATA, NCMD, DCMD and STATE.
Birth certificates publish every metric a node or device will report. Death certificates tell subscribers the data is stale.

Safety

NCMD and DCMD messages can write to devices. Restrict which clients may publish to command topics on the broker.