We are more excited to announce the availability of new MQTT Broker version, MQTTRoute 3.2. The latest version comes up with new exciting features & huge performance improvements to enhance the user experience. This release will surely provide you a good user-friendly experience & further improves the availability & reliability for your applications.

Feature highlights

The highlights of MQTTRoute 3.2 version include,

• $Sys – System topic support

• Clean off-line message Queue

• High Availability Support

• Switch widget support in Dashboard

• UI support to publish & subscribe topics

$Sys – System topic support

$Sys topics or System topics has gained popularity over the years for debugging & developing MQTT applications. It is a special metric which can be used to publish data about MQTT Broker and the client sessions. All MQTT clients that subscribe to one or more SYS-Topics receive the present value on the SYS topics as soon as they subscribe. After the successful subscription, the client will receive metrics on a periodical basis.

With the new version, Bevywise MQTT Broker performs SYS topic, which starts with $SYS. This helps developers monitor the present status of the MQTT Broker rapidly.

Users can find data about the MQTT broker by subscribing to topics with the $SYS. On subscription, static topics can only be sent once per client. The rest of the topics will be updated based on every sys_interval seconds. And also, the updates will not be sent if sys_interval is 0.

Here are a few examples for $SYS.

 $SYS/broker/clients/connected

 The total number of clients connected.

 $SYS/broker/clients/active

 The total number of clients connected at present.

Clean Message Queue

The connection to the broker by the client can either be based on

• a non persistent connection (clean session) or

• a persistent connection.

Clean session will help you inform the MQTT broker whether it is necessary to store session data for you. But, not all messages in the persistent connection can be stored. QoS also has an effect on it.

The new version supports a clean message queue which can be used to clean the QoS1 & QoS2 messages of the device that is inactive or disconnected.

With a non persistent connection (clean session – 1), the broker doesn’t store any subscription information or undelivered messages for the client. So, the ‘Clean’ button won’t be enabled.

With a persistent connection (clean session – 0), the broker will store subscription information, and undelivered messages for the client. It is obvious that, only the QoS 1 and QoS 2 messages are stored even for a “persistent” connection. So you can either enable or disable the ‘clean’ button to clean the QoS 1 & QoS messages.

High Availability Support

MQTT Broker must be highly available to be very resilient to failures. This is necessary if you must never lose any MQTT messages. The clustered set up eliminates failure by ensuring publish subscribe mechanisms works on all cluster nodes and the messages are distributed without any single point of failure. With the new update, Bevywise MQTT Broker supports high availability in unreliable environments.

Switch widget support

A few months back, in our MQTTRoute 3.0 release, we have added multiple dashboard creation feature with prebuilt widgets. The prebuilt widgets include Text, color, Line, Bar, Gauge, vertical gauge, horizontal gauge, LED Light widget. To the above mentioned list, we have added one more pre-built widget named Switch widget in the latest version MQTTRoute 3.2. A Switch is a two-state toggle widget that can select between two options. It can be an on/off condition which helps you choose the current state.

UI support to publish & subscribe topics

The clean user interface of MQTT Broker provides the quick overview of recent happenings in the MQTT Broker. Default dashboard provides a count on active devices, connected devices, events & commands and more. To that list, we have added publish & subscribe topics as well. Users can now view the publish & subscribe topic listing.

The new, updated features and functionalities will ease your IoT application development process.

Feel free to write to support for a complete Demo.

After months of preparations and development we take enormous pleasure on announcing the availability of updated version of Bevywise MQTT Broker, MQTTRoute 3.0.

Sounds great right!!

The benefits & excellence, the new version is going to provide for the budding application developers to advanced IOT end users will be as great as it sounds. These are intended to make your  IoT application development & application usage much easier & quicker. A few months back, in our MQTTRoute 2.0 update release, we have added some extensions with python hooks such as Custom UI, Custom storage & custom scheduler module which helps you build your application faster within a day. This just leaves your development challenge for your IOT Server application. We still want you to make your IoT application development process easier and also to make you visualize, access and what more you want to do with the data in a way you need. Hence, MQTTRoute is enhanced to support building multiple dashboards with some built-in widgets and to perform data aggregation with scheduler module for effective analysis. Let us take a quick ride on newly added functionalities & its usages.

Let data speak louder

One of the key challenges that every IoT application face is the interpretation of data & analysing it. Connecting data to your central server & collecting it alone will not be a successful IoT application. This is one of the major challenges in IoT application development. The data generated from different IoT devices will not be adaptable  unless you can analyze them and convert them into a comfortable way that is easy to comprehend, process and display visually. Hence, adding up data visualization has become the integral part of any IIoT / IoT application development process. The data becomes more meaningful when it is monitored and analyzed with the use of visualizations. Such capabilities will help in making accurate decisions. That is why they should focus on making their IoT data more meaningful, with data visualization to be able to identify and then act upon it quickly.

We know that the utilities of user interface differ with each application, it is not good to provide the tiresome static dashboard to view & access data. Hence, in the previous update, we have added some python extensions which allow developers to extend the custom user interface module to create their own dashboard & present the data in a way they need. We still want to ease the way of creating custom dashboards for our users. Hence we have added a few pre-built widgets which they can use to present the data in colourful charts & graphs.

Create Multiple Dashboards

A single dashboard to view, manage & access all the generated data will not always be appreciable as the IoT applications deals with ‘n’ number of data sets & parameters / KPIs. So it is fair to provide the support of creating multiple dashboards for the IoT application. That’s why in the new version of MQTT Broker, we allow users to create & customize multiple dashboards exactly the way they want them.

Let’s say, a plant manager of an energy industry, producing energy from varied types of sources, who wants to have all the metrics at his fingertips to keep an eye on the effective working of a industry. As large plant’s energy production and consumption is complex, dashboard with the complete overview is needed to get an idea of its functioning, efficiency, capacity etc. That is significant when it comes to make important decisions or taking immediate action on energy usage and optimization. The key factor that he need to measure is Availability Factor, Energy distribution & Performance ratio etc. For each key factors there will be ‘n’ number of parameters to be considered. Hence each factor needs a separate dashboard to have better understanding.

With the new update, we support 8 built-in widgets includes Text, Color, Line, Bar, Gauge, Vertical gauge, Horizontal gauge, LED Light. These pre-configured widgets will allow users to create a customizable live dashboard. Each widget has a separate way of representing data and hence the right set of data must be paired with right visualization widget to expect a compelling insight.

• Text widget – More often used to display a string of text.

• Color widget – A palette of colors to display the data.

• Line chart – To illustrate trends in data over a period of time.

• Bar chart – To present data that shows changes over time.

• Gauge – To present data on a relative scale, including peak values.

• Vertical Gauge – Same as gauge with vertical scale & multiple pointers.

• Horizontal Gauge – Same as Gauge with horizontal scale & multiple pointers.

• LED Light widget – To display the device status.

Perform data aggregation easily

As discussed earlier, data analysis is the important part of any IoT application. The IoT application will become successful only when the collected data is analysed better to gain valuable insights from it. In between data and data analysis, there is a step known as data aggregation. The raw data which is generated directly from devices should not be used to process directly and it must be cleaned to fit in. Here comes the data aggregation. For example, raw data can be aggregated over a given time period to provide statistics such as average, minimum, maximum, sum, and count. After the data is aggregated and written to a view or report, you can analyze the aggregated data to gain insights about particular resources or resource groups.

To make such aggregation easier, we have added scheduler option. The scheduler module helps in an easy aggregation of data over a time period and the aggregated data can be viewed as reports to perform perfect analysis. This makes an easy and effective analysis of data.

This new additional functionalities will ease & fasten the IoT application development process helping developers to effectively address their development challenges.