Datonis Documentation Home

Getting started with Datonis

Datonis is a cloud-based hosted platform for the Internet of Things. Datonis greatly simplifies the process of building out your IoT device or a 'Thing'. Datonis allows you to:

• Build your connected thing. Stream thing data to the platform in real time.
• Manage and control your things from Datonis.
• Set up real-time rules and triggers to let you know when things go wrong. Get notified in different ways.
• View and query the data being transmitted by your things.
• Use our role based access control to invite additional users and decide who sees what on Datonis.
• Use the Datonis Application API to integrate your application with your thing data.

Building your smart connected thing

Datonis allows anyone to sign up for a free account. To do that

• Go to www.datonis.io and sign up. The platform will ask for a valid e-mail id and password.
• An email with a confirmation link will be mailed to your e-mail id. Click on the link, fill in your details and you should successfully log in.
• Your license details should be available under the Settings menu item.

When you sign up for Datonis, you are, by default, the account administrator. You can also invite additional users to your account if your license allows you to.

Build your connected Thing

You can now start building your connected 'Thing'. To do this you will need to:

• Create an access and secret key in Datonis. This provides a layer of security to how your thing pushes data to Datonis.
• Create a data model of a Thing called a Thing Template and define the parameters that you will be pushing to Datonis.
• Create a Thing with a unique id.
• Download a software library in the programming language of your choice that needs to be installed on your device.
  • This library is available in C, Java, Python and Ruby.
• The software library has examples on how to push data and alerts to Datonis.

Learn how to build your connected Thing

Viewing Thing data on Datonis

Now that you have your thing connected and sending data  to Datonis, you would want to view Thing data. Here are some things you can do.

• Viewing Thing data, both real-time and historical.
• Building custom mashups for your Thing data.

Learn more about viewing Thing data 

Manage and control your Things from Datonis

Now that you have your thing connected and sending data and alerts to Datonis, you would want to manage them. There are several things that you can do to manage your things.

• View and search for your Things.
• Create dynamic groups to organise your things.
• Send control instructions to your things.

Learn more about managing Things

Set up near real-time rules against your Thing data

Datonis provides a  rule engine where you can specify rules against the data and alerts being sent by your things. These rules are written in Javascript so working knowledge of it is useful for writing rules.

You can write the following kinds of rules.

• Rules that run against every data or alert packet sent by your thing.
• Rules that run on a sliding window of data.
• Rules that run against a fixed window of data, say starting from the beginning of the day to now.
• Rules that trigger on absence of data. This is usually used when Thing connectivity is critical and any disconnects and lack of data should be immediately caught.
• Rules against alert data.

The number of rules that you can create are governed by your license.

Learn more about creating rules

Security and Access Control on Datonis

Datonis allows you to invite additional users to the platform and provide granular access control to them. For instance you might wish to add users to the account but only allow them to view data and not delete anything, you can use our Role Based Access Control (RBAC) mechanism to achieve that.

The login used to create the account is the Account Administrator by default. That user cannot change his own access control levels. You can achieve the following by using RBAC.

• Create additional roles in Datonis with access levels.
• Invite new users and assign them to roles.

The number of roles and users that you can create on Datonis is governed by your license.

Datonis also provides a detailed audit trail to users to know what changes have been done by users.

Learn more about RBAC and Audit Trails

Using the Datonis Application API

The Datonis Application API is a fully RESTful JSON based API that can be used to interact with the Datonis platform. Everything that can be achieved using the Datons UI and more can be achieved using the Datonis Application API.

The API can be used for the following purposes.

• As a command line interface (CLI) instead of using the Datonis UI.
• Building custom web and mobile applications for your Things.
• Integrating your thing data with other software systems

We are currently at version 3 of the API. Datonis will maintain backward compatibility to the last major version of the API which is version 2 which is now deprecated.

Learn more about the Datonis Application API

Using the Datonis Analytics Feature (Notebooks)

The Datonis Platform provides a python notebook feature for performing interactive and exploratory data analysis and running machine learning algorithms on your sensor data. This feature is generally useful when you have collected a sizeable amount of data (for a few days/months).

Learn more about the Notebooks Feature

Using MQTT to send data to Datonis

MQTT protocol can be used to send metric data to datonis. MQTT is a bidirectinal pub/sub protocol.

Learn more about MQTT Usage