Introducing Integrations with Google Pub/Sub and Custom MQTT Brokers

Brandon Cannaday
Brandon Cannaday | 1 minute read

Today's release provides new ways to integrate additional services into your Losant IoT applications. You can now publish and subscribe to your own Google Pub/Sub instance or custom MQTT broker.

Google Pub/Sub and Custom MQTT Brokers

These additional integrations are available under a new Integrations menu within your Losant application.

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When you create a new integration you can choose between Google Pub/Sub and MQTT. Each one has its own set of configuration options.

Unlike our existing integrations, which include Twitter, Twilio, SendGrid, and others, we put these under a new menu because they work in a fundamentally different way. The Google Pub/Sub and MQTT integrations open persistent connections to the remote services, which allow you to trigger workflows and publish messages over the connection stream. These connections are automatically monitored and kept alive by Losant.

Triggering Workflows Using Integrations

A new Google Pub/Sub node has been added to trigger workflows from messages published to your Google Pub/Sub instance. The existing MQTT trigger node has been modified to allow triggering from either the Losant broker or a custom MQTT integration.

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The Future of Losant Integrations

Over time we'll be moving the configuration of our existing integrations, like Twilio, SendGrid, and Twitter, under this new menu. This will provide a centralized location to configure all external integrations for your Losant IoT applications. For now, configuration for existing integrations is still done in their respective workflow node properties.

Other Updates

  • When mousing over debug output in the workflow, the path that ran is now highlighted. This provides an easy way to know the path that resulted in the debug message.
  • FIRST and LAST aggregations are now available in the Gauge and Indicator dashboard blocks. The FIRST aggregation returns the first data point within the time window. The LAST aggregation will return the last.
  • Added auto-completion for dashboard context variables when editing dashboard blocks.

What's Next?

With every new release, we really listen to your feedback. By combining your suggestions with our roadmap, we can continue to make the platform easy for you. Let us know what you think in the Losant Forums.