Particle’s Fleet Health Feature, Powered by InfluxDB, Delivers Device-Specific Data for IoT Deployments
By
Jason Myers /
Use Cases, Product, Developer
May 23, 2022
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The Particle platform enables companies to manage and program their IoT devices, bringing them to market quicker. To accomplish this, Particle developers needed to be able to collect telemetry data from a large number of edge IoT devices to measure performance.
A key benefit of the Particle platform is its ability to scale from prototype to enterprise. Developers often prototype IoT devices using microcontrollers like Arduino or Raspberry Pi. This means that when developers need to scale up, they have to rewrite their apps to work with more complex field equipment.
Accessing IoT data
When deploying a large number of IoT devices, developers need to be able to track performance on individual devices because each one may run a different firmware or operating system version. Giving customers direct access to their device data helps them identify issues quicker, or puts them in a better position when working with support to resolve issues faster. Accessing granular device-specific data was a gap for Particle, so its developers set out to build a solution to fill that gap.
Particle developers built their solution in Kubernetes. Each Kubernetes pod includes a Telegraf sidecar that collects data from a Prometheus client for each of three services: a webhook service, an API service, and a device service. Telegraf sends that data to InfluxDB where Particle devs used InfluxQL, and later Flux, to build continuous queries to process and shape that data.
The Fleet Health console
In six months, Particle developers launched the Fleet Health console, which allows users to define device groups and filter on criteria like firmware and operating system version. The associated data helps users identify and isolate issues in their IoT development cycle.
A user-friendly UI caters to a broad range of users and allows them to see the overall health of their devices in aggregate or individually.
Source: Particle
The Fleet Health console helps Particle’s customers and 240,000+ developers gain greater visibility into the performance of edge IoT devices, leading to quicker and more efficient development.
To learn more about how Particle uses InfluxDB in its IoT platform, check out the complete case study.
