I am still a bit puzzled by the ‘last_status_received’ element…
My GW is online, and the uplink/downlink counts show increasing but the timestamp on last_received_status is almost the same as the connected_at timestamp:
As discussions evolve here we get more insights in to the infrastructure - to stop the database(s) melting, some data is cold - ie it’s not updated live - which makes sense.
The wording and the structures imply that the timestamp is when the gateway last sent a status message - the question being is, what is that status message!
@htdvisser, can you tell us how the last_status_received field is defined / updated please.
This depends on the type of gateway. The UDP packet forwarder, as well as the MQTT forwarder of The Things Kickstarter gateway regularly send status messages with information about the gateway. The Basic Station protocol doesn’t send regular status messages, and the only status we get is when it sends the station, firmware, package, model, protocol and features fields when it connects.
Many thanks for the clear feedback. It explains why there is a difference between de gateways. In my case I use the ‘Basic Station’.
As I am trying to monitor my gateways in a simple NodeRed flow, is there a query possible, which basically shows the same status, as is visible the new console?
In other words, where is the console Gateway status retrieved from, and can we do that via any API?
The lack of status messages was opened on Basics Station Github back in November 2019. It includes a response “We have this feature on our roadmap and it will be included in future releases.”
@htdvisser you are a bit closer to the action, Any idea when that might occur?
Reason for asking. I along with others have asked that question in the github issues and no response. Just wondered if htdvisser may have some idea. Not looking for any action on his part.
I would have a go but I’m not sufficiently versed in C to do this. I have looked a few times but could not figure out its architecture to understand how it would be added. I also came to the conclusion it’s not easy and the code may need some restructuring, otherwise it most likely would have already been done by now.
Lean Design
- No external software dependencies (except mbedTLS and libloragw/-v2)
- Portable C code, no C++, dependent only on GNU libc
- Easily portable to Linux-based gateways and embedded systems
aka:
We kept things simple by omitting any design documentation and made all the filenames somewhat cryptic.
I think we can be almost 99.999% sure TTI have their hands full so any addition would be a community effort and it would be rather gateway specific as to what attributes it could send. It would certainly be nice to know if your gateway is cooking or has enough battery life when running on solar.
Maybe @Jeff-UK could make enquiries, particularly as he’s in to solar and a bit of status info may help him too.
Exactly what I do. I have decided not to move to Basics Station until “status” is available.
Even though I bumble my way through writing C, I also send additional gateway data direct from the gateway to a database. Data elements include lorawan traffic (status) data, voltages & temperatures etc inside the gateway and environmental sensors located in close proximity and connected to the gateway.
Great feedback on Github, there is a way in Basics Station to create the “stats” message.
There is a more generic feature where a string of data can be injected from outside Basics Station into the gateway-server link.
For gateway status, all that is needed is another application to append an appropriately formatted string to a file name cmd.fifo and Basics Station will inject this.
The discussion above got me thinking. Since the current default configuration for Basics Station does not send a regular status message, then I assume the load on the Network Server will reduce as gateways move to Basics Station.
Based on the operating experience of the public network, is there now a recommended (or optimum) time period gateways should use between each status message?
The move to V3 is an opportune time for this parameter to be adjusted on the existing gateways.
The same timing would apply to gateways running Basics Station where the stat packet is injected into the gateway-server link
I wouldn’t say the load on the backend reduces with more gateways on Basic Station. Maybe we don’t have to handle as many status messages as before, but with Basic Station gateways we now have to maintain TCP sockets and WebSocket connections. So the load is just different.
Handling status messages isn’t very resource intensive, so my recommendation would be: send it as (in)frequently as you need. If you just need to monitor when the gateway connects/disconnects, you don’t need to send anything, because the Gateway Server knows when the connection breaks. If you want to keep track of message counts on the connection, then that’s also already done by the Gateway Server (although it doesn’t aggregate message counts between different (re)connections for the same gateway). If you want to measure temperature or something, think about how frequently that would change, and find an interval that works for you.
I guess that for most gateways it will be fine to send such status messages every 1-15 minutes.
thank you very much @descartes. I don’t know how I didn’t catch at the very first attempt…after replacing the EUI with teh actual gateway ID i was able to retrieve the curl call and to nest it in my existing script for checking the online status…
