V2/Integrate/Others

Connectors for 3rd Party Applications

Senfi monitors and stores time series data from your existing systems. At the moment, Senfi provides a MQTT interface for receiving data from your systems. To start sending data to Senfi, you need to do the following:

1. Create an integration key/secret pair in the CMS.
2. Design and create a measurement in the CMS.
3. Write a program to read from your system and send it to Senfi's MQTT endpoint.

Publish to MQTT

A typical integration follows this pattern:

External system --> Your application --> Senfi MQTT endpoint

Either the external system you are monitoring pushes to your application, or your application polls the external system for its current values. Either way, once your application has the values of its measurement, you can prepare to send it to Senfi's MQTT endpoint.

MQTT Endpoint

Host

mqtt.senfi.io

Port

1883

Username

<Your integration key>

Password

<Your integration secret>

MQTT topic

ingestor/1/0/live/text/array/ems/<your integration key>/<your measurement code>

Message Format

The message body should be in valid JSON format.

Single measurement

 {
   "data": [
     {
       "tm_source": xxxxxxxxxx,
       "site_id" xxxxxxxx,
       "tag1": "xxxxxxxx",
       "tag2": "xxxxxxxx",
       "metric1": xxxxxxxxx,
       "metric2": xxxxxxxxx
       ...
     }
 }

Multiple measurements

 {
   "data": [
     {
       "tm_source": xxxxxxxxxx,
       "site_id" xxxxxxxx,
       "tag1": "xxxxxxxx",
       "tag2": "xxxxxxxx",
       "metric1": xxxxxxxxx,
       "metric2": xxxxxxxxx
       ...
     },
     {
       "tm_source": xxxxxxxxxx,
       "site_id" xxxxxxxx,
       "tag1": "xxxxxxxx",
       "tag2": "xxxxxxxx",
       "metric1": xxxxxxxxx,
       "metric2": xxxxxxxxx,
       ...
     }
   ]
 }

You must indicate which Site the measurement is meant for. Hence, you need to include the site ID (site_id) in your MQTT message. If your measurement has other tags, you must send them in the message as well.

Note: All tags and metrics must be sent in your message body, or they will be treated as invalid data and discarded.

Metric Data Types

Senfi supports the following data types

• Float
• Integer
• Boolean
• String

Float

Only valid JSON Number is accepted.

• 0
• 0.1
• 1.0e+10

Invalid examples:

• 1.0.0
• "1.0"

Integer

Only valid JSON Number is accepted. Decimal values are truncated.

• 0
• -15
• 1e10

Invalid examples:

• Same as Float

Boolean

Only JSON Boolean is accepted.

• true
• false

Invalid examples:

• "true"
• "FALSE"
• 0
• "1"

String

Any valid JSON String is accepted.

Sample Application

You can take a look at this GitHub repository for a sample application to send data to Senfi's MQTT endpoint.

Publishing Strategy

You can either choose to publish data to Senfi regularly (eg. every second), or only do so upon a change in the metrics. In practice, it is recommended that you publish regularly. This is so that the system is able to tell when data has stopped coming in.

In addition, you can choose to batch the sending of measurements to Senfi. For example, collect 50 measurements and then publish it in a single message. This may be useful if you have fast changing metrics. However, note that tm_source should represent when the measurement is sampled and not when it is sent.