Device Connection and Integration
Fast device integration and reliable data transfers are key factors for successful IoT applications. Volery IoT has built-in gateway and device adapters for typical transportation protocols like MQTT, WebSocket, REST and can be extended to adapt any transportation protocol that is needed. Asynchronous or synchronous device connections are supported depending on the used transportation protocol. All built-in gateway and device adapters only accept encrypted connections and connected devices and gateways must be authorized in order to perform data changes. Volery also contains device connection packages in different programming languages to promote easy and fast device integrations.
Device Management
Every device has a virtual object representation in Volery IoT which makes it easy to track, monitor and manage IoT devices. Information about the device read from it or manually set in the UI are stored in its virtual object representation and is accessible in the UI or via REST APIs.
Notifications related to or sent by devices, gateways or virtual composition objects are shown in the User Interface and can be forwarded via e-mail, slack, SMS or other communication channels. Device schemas, group filters and composition objects allow you to manage devices at a large scale.
Device Types
Volery IoT supports device types to add information to your device attributes like measurement units, user configurations or how to store time series of your measurements. Once the device type configuration is done it can also help you to apply analysis or process rules automatically over unlimited number of devices based on the device type without any further configuration overhead for each device.
Data Reliability and Performance
All data changes from devices, users or internal data processing operations are stored in scalable database clusters with at least two replications. Volery uses high performance and reliable open source software like Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka and MongoDB configured to scale horizontal within Volery’s data schemas.
Generally, CPU and RAM usage are proportional to messages per second and disk space usage is proportional to measurement points. Different data processing and configured rules on streaming data have an effect on CPU and RAM usage but always proportional to messages per second. Volery’s storage schema for historic data is optimized for complex analytic services, Visual Analytics Interfaces and BI Dashboards that leverage large amounts of heterogeneous data.
Data Processing and Rules Engine
Protocol adapter transform unstructured device data into meaningful device schema data. Basic protocol adapters for Modbus, USS, etc. are included in Volery’s core services and it is easy to deploy your own protocol adapter into the platform.
The data of a device is stored as a virtual representation and historic data like time series and notification series unless otherwise configured in the referenced device type. Every measurement or device information sent to Volery can be additionally processed in the Rules Engine of which rules can be programmed graphically. The UI of the rule engine is based on the Node-RED open source project.
Simple rules on single devices with high performance or extraordinary complex rules over device types, device groups or hierarchical organized devices can be configured and adjusted within minutes.
Authorization and Multi-Tenant Concept
The Volery IoT Platform is designed to handle multiple tenants where the data is strictly segregated between them. Within a tenant Volery also allows you to represent your company or customer structure with its flexible user authorization.
Custom developed applications and services can only access data inside the tenant's view, but still uses all Volery core services, databases and streaming platforms.
Security
All APIs for users, devices and within Volery services are encrypted and authorized with state-of-the-art technologies:
- External and internal APIs are always encrypted.
- Credentials like certificates, tokens, logins, etc. to authenticate and authorize gateway and device communication.
- Databases and streaming encryption to secure your data against any infrastructure provider.