We talk a lot about connecting, networking, and securing the Internet of Things, and the billions of devices spread across the globe. Another essential piece of the IoT puzzle is monitoring those devices, specifically with what we call presence.
Presence functionality gives IoT developers a way to monitor individual or groups of IoT devices in realtime. Whenever the state of the device changes, the change is reflected in realtime to a dashboard, with an alert, or any other way you want to display your tracking.
What Can Presence Monitor?
As soon as you start streaming large volumes of data, or signaling and trigger actions to devices, you need to know what devices are connected. So what kinds of device states can you monitor with presence functionality? Pretty much anything you want! With Presence functionality, you can build out custom device states including:
- Online/offline status
- Device health
- Capacity for fleet management
- Total device count in field
- Battery/location status
- Machine status (eg. currently working on X task, driver driving/offline)
- Temperature and weather data from IoT sensors
With presence data, you can also log a history of device connectivity for audits and analytics. It’s not just about having realtime insight into your devices, but also tracking and logging performance, health, and other key metrics.
Why Is It Important?
Devices may get expensive: IoT devices can be expensive, so keeping tabs on your investment is essential. Device health presence monitoring gives you up to the millisecond health reports for device temperature, connectivity, battery life, etc, ensuring you that your device is 100% operational, all the time. And if any issues arise, you’ll know immediately that maintenance is required.
Devices may be imperative to operations/business: If IoT devices are at the core of business and operations, monitoring their health and status is paramount. Whether it’s agriculture readings, security sensors, or delivery fleet management, up to the millisecond device status can make or break a business.
Device Analytics: Accurate and up to date statistics and analytics is important to any IoT application or business. Presence functionality can store, retrieve, and playback collected analytics, for example, to give a history of device connectivity or health for audits.
Machine-to-Machine and IoT Use Cases for Presence
As we know, connected devices come in all shapes and sizes. And as IoT devices get smarter, more connected, more secure, and faster, they’re use in the field is skyrocketing across the globe. And as we add more devices into the field, realtime presence functionality is just as important as our device networks and IoT security.
Agriculture: As with other connected technologies, the Internet of Things has found heavy adoption in the agricultural industry. Sensors and monitoring devices for temperature, irrigation, weather patterns, and harvest management give farmers a realtime, accurate data stream, giving them full control over their agriculture system. As a result, keeping tabs on their vast system of IoT devices with presence functionality is key.
Connected Car/Shipping & Freight: Smart cars are shifting IoT boundaries and constitutes a disruptive and transformative environment. Connected car represents a large number of IoT use cases for automobiles including taxi, fleet management, shipping and freight, and delivery service. Connected cars require a secure and reliable connection to counter the various roadblocks that arise in the wild, such as constantly changing cell and network towers and dropped connections.
For taxi, shipping, freight, and delivery management, custom presence functionality is a vital component of the business, providing realtime custom vehicle and device states, such as vehicle and cargo capacity, location data, and device health.
Home Automation: We’re well aware that our homes are getting smart. It seems today, every appliance has an IP address. It’s safe to say that the smart home market is prepared to take the world by storm. Especially for applications that enable users to control their homes remotely, presence functionality is essential. In the smart home, presence gives users a realtime view of their devices status (lights on, doors locked, water leak, thermostat, fridge temperature, etc). And that’s the basis of a solid home automation solution.
Presence on the PubNub Data Stream Network
PubNub Channel Presence is one of the core features of the PubNub Data Stream Network. It enables developers to add user and device detection to their web, mobile, and IoT applications, giving realtime instant detection and notification of user/device status. Built on the global PubNub Data Stream Network, no matter where the devices are located, you can get an accurate and reliable reading on any custom device state you want.
For a quick tutorial on using Presence for IoT devices, whether it’s a network of 1000 connected devices or a single Arduino, check out our blog post: Realtime IoT Monitoring for Devices with PubNub Presence.
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