Tag: monstermq

🌳 Views / Virtual Topic Trees in MonsterMQ Edge!

One thing has always bothered me about MQTT in practice: devices publish where they want to, for example: tasmota/devices/14835A/...

The device ID is in there, fine. But every time I want to query or subscribe to that sensor, I first have to look up what device 14835A actually is. Is it my living room or is it the kitchen? Is it a temp sensor? Or is it a power meter?

With virtual topics, you can now define views on top of real topics. The sensor above can also be made available as: austria/vogler/office/temperature/..

Same data, two (or more) names. No republishing, no copying, no duplicated messages.

  • 👉 Map a single topic, or mount a whole subtree
  • 👉 Wildcard subscriptions work on the virtual tree
  • 👉 Each node is read-only or read-write

That way you can have a location view, an asset view, or an ISA-95 style view of the same devices, all at the same time.

Now my question to you: is this useful, or should I drop it again? How do you deal with this today? Republishing in Node-RED, a strict UNS naming convention from day one, or just an Excel sheet? 😉

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MonsterMQ with Grafana

Because MonsterMQ can store topic values directly in PostgreSQL/Timescale, you can instantly create dashboards with Grafana! 📊

Here’s a simple example:

👉 Check out the live dashboard

It’s super easy to get started. Use the public available MonsterMQ at test.monstermq.com at port 1883. Just publish a JSON string to any topic under “Test”, like “Test/Sensor1” with a payload like this: {“value”: 1}, and you’ll see the value reflected in the Grafana dashboard in real time.

I’m currently publishing temperature sensor values to the public broker from my home automation using automation-gateway.com. Just that you see some values in the dashboard.

So, if you need a broker to store your IoT data directly into TimescaleDB without the need for any additional components, consider using MonsterMQ. It’s free and available at MonsterMQ.com.

Here is the exmaple docker-compose.yml file of the public availble test.monstermq.com broker:

services:
  timescale:
    image: timescale/timescaledb:latest-pg16
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "5432:5432"
    volumes:
      - /data/timescale:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: system
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: xxx
  monstermq:
    image: rocworks/monstermq:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 1883:1883
    volumes:
      - ./config.yaml:/app/config.yaml
    command: ["+cluster", "-log INFO"]
  pgadmin:
    image: dpage/pgadmin4
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      PGADMIN_DEFAULT_EMAIL: andreas.vogler@rocworks.at
      PGADMIN_DEFAULT_PASSWORD: xxx
    volumes:
      - /data/pgadmin:/var/lib/pgadmin/storage
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
    - 80:3000

Here is the MonsterMQ config.yml file:

Port: 1883
SSL: false
WS: true
TCP: true

SessionStoreType: POSTGRES
RetainedStoreType: POSTGRES

SparkplugMetricExpansion:
  Enabled: true

ArchiveGroups:
  - Name: "All"
    Enabled: true
    TopicFilter: [ "#" ]
    RetainedOnly: false
    LastValType: POSTGRES
    ArchiveType: NONE
  - Name: "Test"
    Enabled: true
    TopicFilter: [ "Test/#" ]
    RetainedOnly: false
    LastValType: NONE
    ArchiveType: POSTGRES

Postgres:
  Url: jdbc:postgresql://timescale:5432/monster
  User: system
  Pass: xxx

Give it a try and let me know what you think!

#iot #mqtt #monstermq #timescale #postgresql #grafana