Hello, community
I am working on building a solution where I want to store data in a cloud and parse it to a dashboard that is available ONLINE (to the client)
I´ve searched the internet and saw many approachs Grafana cloud seems a good one integrating with some DB cloud.
My question is What is in your opinion the best services (cost/performance rate) that would integrate this.
Concluding, what Cloud + online dashboard combo to you recon.
Thanks.
Hi @bioshock2k,
In my opinion, Grafana + one of the cloud systems that Grafana supports (Graphite, ElasticSearch, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and others) would work fine, but you have to deploy it on your own. You can also check https://thingsboard.io/ if you want ready to use solutions.
Thank you!
Thingboard did cross my search pages but also needs a DB.
What DB would you recommend? My applications are simple
Which LoRaWAN server setup are you using?
For a quick win I use HTTP Integration to a web server, PHP picks it up & puts it in mySQL. PHP provides a REST interface for whatever data consumer but also allows me to put some charts & tables on the web server for debug purposes.
I hear myDevices Cayenne is good if you are using TTN as there is a direct integration.
@bioshock2k
Well, this depends on if you need SQL or NoSQL database.
As I read on the ThingsBoard site they recommend :
I will not be using TTN as, in this specific implementation, network fails for some days sometimes.
I need local storage and when online a cloud DB.
The handling of information i need to code.
I am open to wtv is better/does the job.
I will look into that! thank you very much!
If anyone has some experience that would be also great
Is this a function of backhaul connectivity issues?
Which gateway do you have?
Countryside where cable connection gets cut by weather and other events, leading to an offline state for 3 to 4 days. Adding to that there’s no GSM service at all.
I have a RAK7258 which I will pair with a raspberry pi 4 for the logic part of the message logging etc.
Thankfully, the store & forward element of the uplink is made simpler as you don’t need to replicate it as such, just upload.
The Pi can either be a web server for HTTP Integration or run an MQTT client to get the data, put the uplinks in to nice sized parcels, compress them and when there is internet, upload/rsync to the central machine for processing and ingest.
The Pi can also act as a local server for a local dashboard if there is internet in the area, just not to the outside world. On the Pi I’d use SQLite. And a Pi 3 will have more than enough capacity so you don’t need to go to a 4.
The key thing here is to make the whole lot out of lots of small building blocks so you can swap things around if any one element isn’t quite right.
Exactly, in a FIFO order the messages can just be uploaded.
The MQTT client for me seems the most simple since i know Node-red. So with my knowledge i would for that way.
Any HTTP integration advice for me to look at?
Exatly that´s what im going for modules…but for now my path is foggy but getting brigther
This will be loading a fair amount of ‘stuff’ in to memory - if you do Python, MQTT for that is just a few Iines of code and can be integrated in to the OS as a proper real service.
If you can do PHP, these are first two lines:
$data = file_get_contents(“php://input”);
$json = json_decode($data, true);
After that, it’s just a whole series of nested key-value array references!
That is true, maybe when I can see the whole system I would go for effiency.
I cannot 
but i will look into it!
Thank you for the help i will work on it now.
There are many online IoT platforms to choose from. I usually use Thingsboard.io and Ubidots. But their services usually requires you to be online 24/7.
Thank you! Ubidots i have experience thingsboard i don´t, let´s see.
I strongly recommend ThingsBoard if you are using Chirpstack as a network server. Chirpstack has a ThingsBoard integration which makes it very easy to use.
ThingsBoard has good instructions for deploying your own server, and you can setup many tenants for your different customers in the ThingsBoard admin panel. It has been great for my company to use.
Thank you! I will look into that option.
Many are recommending Thingsboard so i will see it!
Thingsboard is really nice with lots of flexibility and possible modification on how you want your visualization to look. You can event create your own custom widget. I experience few bugs though in the past which is a normal trade-off. Lot of features means lots of possible bugs.
If simplicity is in your mind, ubidots is a better choice. You cant customized too much but it does the job showing you the data.
I’ve been working on a general IoT solution:
It has an embedded database for managing basic config, users, device state, rules, etc. For timeseries data, simple iot supports storing data in influxdb. I’ve used grafana in the past for graphing, but hope to eventually have graphs in the simple iot web UI. Grafana is great if you don’t have a lot of sites and can afford to set up graphs/dashboards for each site manually. Once you get to 10’s of devices, maintaining lots of dashboards can be time consuming.
Simple IoT is not a drag-n-drop experience, but rather requires some programming and may be a good solution if you want to own your IoT platform.
I really like Go applications, as they are typically statically linked and easy to deploy and run – often just a single binary.
You can easily run siot, influxdb, grafana on a $5/mo digital ocean server. Here are ansible roles to deploy the pieces:
Caddy is nice as it gives you automatic https with lets-encrypt.
I’ve deployed the above stack for several projects and it has proven to be very efficient and reliable solution.
I’ve not done any LPWAN integration, but would like to in the future.
Here are some notes on the possible future direction of the Simple IoT project and provides some explanation of the thinking behind it: