Usage

Agents are able to provide three resource types:

• Cybus::Connection

• Cybus::Endpoint

• Cybus::Mapping

The endpoint resource can also use the rules property to enable direct data-manipulation and pre-processing on the edge using the rule engine (edge processing).

In order to start such resources on the agent, you must set the agentName property at each Connection in your commissioning file. All Endpoint resources using that connection will automatically also run on the the same agent as well without setting any further properties.

The value of the agentName property (as available for Cybus::Connection resources) must match exactly the value of the CYBUS_AGENT_NAME environment variable used during agent startup.

You can find an example commissioning file here.

Troubleshooting

As for docker logs: The logs can not be accessed from within Connectware. Instead, the logs must be collected and made accessible by the orchestration tool.

Connection Loss

If there is a connection loss between agent and central Connectware, the data connectivity is broken and messages will be lost. In particular, due to the resource management system, any connection from the agent to a machine will stop receiving data as long as the connection to the central Connectware is broken.

Nevertheless, short-term temporary connection outages (such as less than a few seconds) can be covered by using the MQTT QoS (quality of service) level. This QoS level must be set on a per-endpoint basis, because it must be set for each published package and for each subscription individually. To set this for the MQTT connection from the agent to the central Connectware, set the qos property of each involved Endpoint to the value 1 (one) instead of zero. (QoS level 2 is most likely not useful in the industry context and is not recommended here.) Setting a non-zero QoS level will ensure that no in-flight MQTT message is getting lost if there is a temporary network outage.

However, as soon as the MQTT connection loss between agent and Connectware gets noticed by the agent, it will stop receiving data from the machine, and the Connectware in turn will mark the respective resources as deviated.

If you are interested in how to set up different solutions for a distributed data collection system that could also tolerate temporary network fragmentation, please contact our support team at [e-mail].

User Registration Conflict

If the user registration as described above is not accepted by Connectware but lets the agent print a log message 409 Conflict, most likely there is already an existing user with the given agent name in Connectware, but with a different password. The easiest solution is to go to the “User Management” page in the Admin-UI and delete that particular user, see Deleting Users.

The full message at the agent’s log in such cases is the following:

{
    'level': 30,
    'time': 1590665714502,
    'msg': 'Failed to register agent. Response: 409 Conflict. A conflicting registration might be pending, or a user with the same username myAgent is already existing (which you must delete first).',
}