Today's update adds major new functionality to Losant's Gateway Edge Agent (GEA). We've added Beckhoff to our ever-growing collection of southbound industrial connectors and we've also added automated health checks for the GEA Docker container.
Beckhoff Connectors
This release adds three new edge workflow nodes that make it easy to incorporate Beckhoff PLCs into your IoT solutions.
Beckhoff joins our platform's growing collection of industrial connectors that now includes Allen-Bradley, Siemens S7, OPC UA, Modbus, BACnet, SNMP, and more.
These protocols, combined with our Connected Product Foundation, deliver one of the most robust platform foundations for your customer-facing industrial IoT products and services.
GEA Health Check
The GEA now supports Docker's built-in HEALTHCHECK functionality. By default, this automatically monitors the health of the GEA process. You can also optionally configure it to monitor the GEA's connection to Losant's MQTT broker. This means that if the GEA loses connection to the platform, its container will be marked as "unhealthy".
You can automatically restart unhealthy containers by running another container called Autoheal. More about the GEA's health check functionality and how to configure Autoheal can be found in our documentation.
Other Updates
As always, this release comes with several other features and improvements, including:
- Device advanced queries are now supported in nearly every dashboard block.
- The Device: State Trigger can now optionally trigger on invalid payloads. This is useful when debugging devices that may intermittently report invalid data.
- A device metadata file is now included as part of automatic application archiving. This allows you to also maintain a backup of all device configuration as well as its time-series data.
What’s Next?
With every new release, we listen to your feedback. By combining your suggestions with our roadmap, we can continue to improve the platform while maintaining its ease of use. Let us know what you think in the Losant Forums.