Monitoring and controlling devices¶

Locating devices¶

IoT Extension provides the option to view all devices in your account on a map.

Click "Map" in the Devices menu in the navigator to display a map showing all devices in realtime.

Devices are represented as "pins". Click a pin to see the name of the respective device. Click the device name to switch to the device details.

Connection monitoring¶

In the "Device Management" application you have the option to monitor the connections to your devices.

This can be done at the level of individual devices (see below) or across multiple devices in a list.

To monitor the connections for multiple devices, open any device list.

The connection status is represented by arrows in the "Status" column in the device list.

Send connections

The top arrow represents the "Send connection" (traffic from the device to IoT Extension). The status for the "Send connections" may be one of:

• "Online" (data was sent within the required interval)- indicated by a green arrow
• "Offline" (data was not sent within the required interval) - indicated by a red arrow
• "Unknown" or not monitored (no interval configured) - indicated by a grey arrow

Hovering over the arrow displays the timestamp of the last request from the device to the server.

When a device is detected to be offline (stops sending data within required interval and top arrow changes to red color), an unavailability alarm is created for the device reading "No data received from device within required interval".

Push connections

The bottom arrow represents the "Push connection" (from IoT Extension to the device). The status for the "Push connections" may be one of:

• "Online" (connection established)- indicated by a green arrow
• "Offline" (connection not established) - indicated by a red arrow
• Not monitored - indicated by a grey arrow

Maintenance mode

Moreover, the device may be in "Maintenance" mode, indicated by the tool icon in the Status column. This is a special connection status indicating that the device is currently being maintained and cannot be monitored. While a device is being maintained, no alarms for that device are raised.

You can turn maintenance mode on or off for a device through a slider in the "Connection monitoring" card in its Info tab.

Connection monitoring in the "Info" tab

To monitor the connections of a particular device, go to the Info tab of this device. Under "Device status", the connection status for the device is displayed.

Below the send connection and push connection status, the time of the last communication is displayed.

In the "Required interval" field you can specify an interval. This parameter defines how often you expect to hear from the device. If, for example, you set the required interval to 60, you expect the device at least to communicate once in an hour with IoT Extension. The interval is either set by the device itself, based on the device's knowledge how often it will try to send data, or it is set manually by you.

If an interval is set, you will find the "Maintenance" slider below it.

With the "Maintenance" slider you can turn the maintenance mode for the device on or off which is immediately reflected in the connection status.

Service Monitoring¶

IoT Extension distinguishes between connection monitoring and service monitoring. Connection monitoring, as described in the previous section, only indicates if the device is communicating with IoT Extension, it does not automatically indicate if it is functional or not.

"Service monitoring" indicates if a device is in service. For example, a vending machine is in service if it is ready to sell goods. A vending machine can sell goods using cash money without a connection to IoT Extension. From the perspective of a merchant, it is in service. Similar, if you switch off the power on a gateway, the devices behind the gateway can still continue to work.

IoT Extension considers a device to be in service while there is no critical, unresolved alarm present for the machine. This is displayed as a share of time such an alarm was present. If a machine didn't have any critical alarms whatsoever during a time period, it was 100% in service. If half of the time there was some critical, unresolved alarm, the machine was 50% in service.

While a machine is offline, IoT Extension assumes by default

• that the machine continues to stay in service during the connection outage, if this was the status before it lost connection.
• that the machine continues to stay out of service, if this was the status before it lost connection.

There may be exceptions from this rule. If your vending machines rely exclusively on cashless payment, losing the connection to the network means that your machine is out of service and stops selling. In this case, unavailability alarms must be set in the "Administration" application which have CRITICAL severity instead of MAJOR severity.

IoT Extension displays service availability at the level of individual devices and across all devices.

To check the service monitoring of this specific device, click the "Service monitoring" tab in the details of a particular device.

To display the overall service across all devices, click "Service monitoring" in the navigator.

The "Service monitoring" page shows the availability percentage of devices for the last day, last week and last month.