Kronometrix IoT Gateway is a simple to use, automatic data collection and transport utility with a small system footprint that supports raw data collection from Industrial IoT, enterprise ICT, web applications, weather and environmental devices. The system, contains all needed software and hardware components:
- Single Board Computer
- the operating system
- the data recording package
- and all configurations
A MicroSD card, includes all software modules and packages, available from www.kronometrix.com. Running on top of Raspberry PI SBC, Kronometrix IoT Gateway (K1 Internal Technical Name) is very simple to use and run or embed to other different projects.
How does it work ?
You can connect Kronometrix IoT Gateway to your network and get access to its main features using a screen and a keyboard, or remotely using SSH2 protocol or a serial connection. You can select what data recorders you want to run, using the main configuration file kronometrix.json, from ICT enterprise to IoT:
- measuring the performance and availability of several web sites or applications using HTTP/HTTPS protocol
- fetching data from different Internet & enterprise services, like: IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SMTP, HTTP, MariaDB, Memcached, Redis, Isilion storage or any TCP based service
- checking the performance and availability of different UDP services, like NTP, DHCP
- measure indoor or city air pollution using different industrial MODBUS sensors and devices
- fetch data from various weather equipment using USB or direct SERIAL connections
A future version will offer a simple web management interface to simplify even further the management and usage of Kronometrix IoT gateway.
Recorders
A central part of our IoT gateway are the data recorders. Recorders are not software agent(s), nor they should be confused with them. They are independent, light software probes designed as CLI to test and fetch certain minimal data points from different parts of a system(s), more or less same way how a sensor operates. The recorders share a common runtime engine, powered by Perl5. The recorders do not know nor have any knowledge of any transport layer. The output of each data recorder is a simple CSV based raw data file, stored locally on the gateway for a number of days. For more information you can read here. By default the sampling rate of a data recorder is 60 seconds, which is configurable.
Transport
The original raw data can be transported for further analysis and visualisation to Kronometrix SaaS, or any other Kronometrix installation or even to 3rd parties analytics or business intelligence platforms. The transport utility keeps tracks of any raw data changes and periodically sends the update to one or many backend destinations, using HTTP or HTTPS protocol. The transport utility uses a JSON based configuration file.
The data recorders and transport utilities are built together as a binary package for several operating systems. For systems or installations which do not require a complete IoT gateway there is always a possibility to manually install the data recording package.
Raw data
All recorded observations are stored as raw data. Raw data is produced by a recorder, which fetches data from a system, device or sensor, data which has not been modified, altered or changed in any way. All collected metrics are variable measured sequentially in time, called time series. All these observations collected over fixed sampling intervals create a historical time series. To easy the access to all this set of data we store the observations on commodity disk drives, compressed, in text format, like CSV format.
Time series let us understand what has happened in past and look in the future, using various statistical models.
What’s New ?
There are new features and improvements available on the latest version of Kronometrix IoT Gateway 1.4. Some of the very important features:
- Computer system data recorders, sysrec, diskrec, nicrec have been updated to support latest CentOS and Debian Linux operating systems
- NTP data recorder, ntprec, improvements and fixes when fetching data from one or many NTP servers
- IoT data recorder, rs485rec: support for data correction, error handling fixes and better logging features
- Internet and enterprise data recorder, svcrec, performance improvements when handling thousands TCP or UDP services. We have added support to allow custom UDP probes, if necessarily.
- Software stack updates
- Security updates