Device profiles definition

There is no way to put a simulated device in low-power mode but it is safe to assume that in those cases, the devices would disconnect from Digi Remote Manager. The following snippet shows a connection_settings configuration to schedule disconnections and reconnections for all devices as if they were in low-power mode.

The IoT Device Simulator allows to test how the devices would behave if they suffered a connection lost issue. For that, configure the connection_settings object accordingly to your test scenario:

A device can be in maintenance mode to perform some tasks, such as updating its firmware. With this feature, you can simulate when the first maintenance window starts, how long it lasts, and when it should be repeated.

To configure a maintenance window cycle, add a maintenance_window object, fill the start_time of the first cycle following ISO 8601 format, the frequency, and, finally, configure the duration of the maintenance window.

In this case, the first maintenance window starts on January 10th, 2024 and will be repeated every day at the same time. Each maintenance window lasts 1 hour.

There are scenarios where the maintenance or in service status of a device depends on external parameters. In such cases, the operating mode of the device can be determined by custom code, using an application. See Custom code implementation for more information about the required code.

For example, a device might enter maintenance mode for one hour when certain conditions occur. To achieve this, custom code must be provided, and the maintenance_window must be configured to use your code:

The devices of the simulation can have their firmware "updated". This means that you can start a firmware update process and have your simulated devices behave as if they were running the update. In this case, the firmware update is successful for all devices of the simulation. To do so, add and configure the fw_update object:

In the example the firmware update process takes two minutes and there are three different messages: until 25% of progress, until 70%, and until 100%.

Most of the time the firmware update works fine, but there may be other times when something unexpected occurs. This example configures your simulated devices to fail randomly in different stages of the firmware update process.

To create a simulation where most of devices fail at certain points of the update add and configure the fw_update object as follows:

With this configuration most or all of the devices fails in different stages of the update allowing you to understand how your setup would behave under fatal issues.

Some devices support on-the-fly firmware updates, that is the firmware is written directly to the non-active partition while being downloaded.

You can configure your simulated devices to behave this way:

Usually, any device would sample data periodically, such as reading sensors or diagnostics data to identify certain conditions. Then, data is bundled and uploaded to Remote Manager periodically.

To simulate this scenario add and configure the data_streams object as follows:

Ideally, the preferred way to upload data is as a batch, although there may be times when data must be uploaded as it is sampled. This generates more traffic with Remote Manager.

To achieve this behavior add and configure the data_streams object as follows:

In this case, each simulated device using this profile uploads sampled data as it is generated. If a sample cannot be uploaded, it is added to a queue and uploaded along with the next sample when it is generated.

The IoT Device Simulator allows to handle the file system of the simulated devices virtually or physically. A virtual file system is stored in memory and does not consume disk space. This can be useful when having a great number of simulated devices in order to optimize the resources used by the IoT Device Simulator.

A physical file system is a directory, per device, in your computer. This option allows you to have easier access to each file system, but it can impact the disk storage of your computer.

To use a virtual file system, do the following:

The IoT Device Simulator allows you to set an initial file system to every device associated with a profile. This way, each group of devices can have different initial file systems. Also, if you want to rerun a simulation with the same number of devices as a previous one, you can enable the flag to reuse the previous file systems so all changes done to them are kept for the new simulation. To achieve this, you have to: