Sonar
Aug 31 2022 at 12:00 AM
Overview
1. What does Sonar do?
Sonar is a purpose-built application integrated directly into the Virtual Raptor™’s Software Development Kit (SDK), that provides device management capabilities, including support and monitoring, for any type of device connected to the IoT.nxt® Commander™ platform through the Virtual Raptor™.
2. What are the benefits of Sonar?
- Monitors the status of connected devices
- Monitors health of connected devices’ communication interfaces
- Provides standardisation for large-scale solutions
- Locates devices with issues and can identify the underlying cause
- Data in Sonar is stored for a rolling 24-hour window
- Ability to view any device activity over a brief period
Capabilities of Sonar
1. Monitoring
The Sonar application primarily handles visualisations of different interacting services, gateways, devices, etc. The visualisations will contain RAG (Red Amber Green) status graphs with the ability to drill into further detail if required.
The RAG status graph visually indicates whether a gateway is healthy, having minor issues or has failed completely. As per the architectural flow diagram, the virtual Raptor is seen as top level service. This service needs to remain stable and should not be restarted or interfered with unless absolutely necessary, therefore the visualisations indicating lower-level drill downs depict issues where services are not functioning as expected and require investigation. A secondary telemetry pipeline is utilised as a layer in conjunction to the rest, this layer will aggregate information and make the final determining decisions of the RAG status of a gateway (Micro Raptor™, V-Raptor™, Edge Raptor™, Teltonika, etc.)
Once services on the different levels start showing issues, visual alarms and warnings are displayed via the Sonar application.
2. V-Raptor™’s SDK Product
Sonar is integrated directly into the Virtual Raptor™’s SDK (Software Development Kit) making it simple for device integrators to incorporate our device management layer into their device drivers. It also ensures that all drivers written with the SDK, expose a base set of device management features without the need for additional development effort.
Through the SDK, developers can provide contextualised information describing in detail what is happening at the edge including:
- Accurately identifying devices by providing attributes such as make, model, firmware version, communication protocols, vendor and so forth
- Describing the status of a device, both in terms of connectivity and device activity
- Notifying of interesting events such as authentication failures, restarts and configuration changes.
- Providing explanations for any failures encountered while communicating with the device. For example, missing information due to corrupt data being received.
3. Commander™ Integration
The Sonar application collates information from connected Virtual Raptors™ and the Commander™ platform, providing a view into both systems’ versions of the information. Through this integration, end-users can identify discrepancies due to installation errors or undocumented changes made to the configurations of devices. It is also integrated with Commander™’s user management system which allows access to the application to be restricted as required.
4. Dedicated Information Pipeline
Information from the Virtual Raptor™ is transmitted to Sonar via a dedicated pipeline, the sole responsibility of which is the timeous transmission of device management information. This ensures that device management information does not interfere with the Virtual Raptor™’s ability to transmit telemetry to Commander™. The dedicated pipeline also provides Sonar with the ability to report on the health of the Virtual Raptor™’s services so that telemetry backlogs can be managed.
5. Modular Deployment Model
Sonar and its supporting services are designed to be deployed as an optional extension to the platform. As such it can be billed separately from endpoint traffic, allowing clients flexibility in terms of how much device monitoring they want to incorporate into their solutions. Update frequencies as well as the specific metrics that should be tracked can be enabled on a per-driver level, providing the ability to gradually scale up monitoring features and associated costs as the project progresses. Clients will be billed for the number of devices that are managed by Sonar as well as the frequency that Sonar is notified of changes to these devices.