Viewing Thing Data

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This tutorial assumes that you have set up your Thing and started pushing data to Datonis. The article Building your connected Thing with the Datonis Agent SDK covers this in detail.

It also assumes that you know about Things. Things can transmit Metrics, Waypoints and Alerts to Datonis. This section covers the default visualisations that Datonis provides for viewing this data.

Viewing Metric Timeseries data

Here is a short video that walks you through the process of viewing metrics for a Thing.

Data Views

While viewing metrics, there are three views that need to be understood.

Default metric view

The default metric view shows all metrics (maximum of a 5 at a time) plotted on separate line charts one below the other. You can see the trend of values over a period of time as well as counts for each metric.

Correlated metric view

If you wish to look at multiple metrics on the same line chart to understand their behavior with respect to each other, you can switch to the correlated metric view. The graph on this view uses a logarithmic scale to account for the differences in magnitudes of the selected metrics.

Tabular view

This view offers a simple and easy to use paginated table for allowing you to have a closer look at data.

Selecting time ranges

These trends show data for last 1 hour which is automatically refreshed every 5 minutes by default. You can adjust both - the refresh interval as well as the window of time (time range) for visualizing the data. If you select a broader time range, the views will show aggregated data.

Aggregations are automatic rollups of the metric data. For instance, let us assume that you are sending temperature readings every 10 seconds to Datonis. Datonis will automatically roll up this metric at a minute, hour, day boundaries.  So if there are 6 temperature readings sent to Datonis in a minute, Datonis will automatically create a 'minute' level aggregation of that metric.  Min, max and average values are automatically computed. This ensures that querying metric data is extremely fast.

If you perform queries across larger time ranges, you will notice that the view automatically aggregates the data at hourly, daily levels. Hovering your mouse over a metric value will also show you the avg, min and max values observed for that interval (or aggregation level)

Downloading as data CSV

You can also download data in a CSV format for offline analysis. If the data is rolled up, you will have min, max, sum, count and avg values for each metric for each rollup window.

Viewing Thing alert data

Alerts are special events that can be reported by Edge devices to the platform. These are usually messages regarding:

• Certain abnormal activity/alarm that is detected by the edge device on the thing (asset) that it is connected to. For example, it could be a "door left open" alarm generated for a critical asset.
• Abnormal condition with respect to the edge device itself. For example, it could be a an alert regarding a critically low battery status on a the device that is monitoring an Oil well - which is sent before it stops transmitting.

Here is a short video that walks you through the activity of viewing alert messages for a connected Thing or Asset.

Mashups

Mashups allow you to build custom visualisations of your metric data. Here is a short video that walks you through creating a mashup.

Here are some things to be considered while creating mashups.

• A single mashup can hold upto 10 widgets. 
• Adding widgets consists of selecting widget types, selecting Things and their metrics. Each widget imposes a restriction on the number of metrics it can display. For instance, the Latest Value widget can only display a single metric. A line chart can display upto 5 metrics.
• The configure metrics section in the Add Widget wizard will have widget specific configuration options. For instance, while adding an Angular Gauge widget, you can set lower,intermediate and higher limit values.

Mashups currently support a number of chart types including line, area, bar and pie, donut, radar, angular gauges and a table view.

Viewing Thing waypoints

Waypoints are location datapoints (pairs of latitude and longitude coordinates) that are sent periodically to Datonis. These are useful for tracking movements of moving assets like trucks, school buses etc. Please refer the Datonis SDK documentation for more information on how to send waypoints for moving assets.

Here is a short video that describes how to view waypoints for such a moving asset: