Blues has introduced fleet management capabilities to simplify large-scale IoT deployments.

In response to users increasing the size and complexity of their deployments, Blues is introducing three fleet management capabilities – Smart Fleets, Fleets to Exclude and Batch Jobs – that simplify working with, manipulating and managing connected device fleets at scale.

Used individually or in combination, the tools are for fleet orchestration and task automation, reducing effort, human error and ultimately improving the quality of data routed to the cloud.

When an IoT project moves from pilot into production, users encounter challenges working with fleets that can grow to hundreds of thousands of connected devices. Previously available only as a bespoke set of features across various providers in the IoT space, Blues’ fleet management capabilities are now core to its offering and allow fleet administrators to work at scale, reviewing, configuring and managing the behaviour of entire sets of devices efficiently and reliably:

• Smart Fleets use real-time operational data to group devices dynamically and automatically into one or more sub-fleets within a larger fleet, simplifying analytical, management or administrative tasks
• Fleets to Exclude allow fleet admins to remove problematic data sources rapidly and easily from outbound cloud routing, protecting downstream analytics, alerting and diagnostics from contamination due to known bad data
• Batch Jobs enable fleet admins to perform consistent, repeatable tasks (including applying configurations, provisioning devices and migrating fleets in bulk) safely and reliably across either their entire fleet or subsets of their fleet

With Smart Fleets, devices are automatically added to or removed from sub-fleets based on configurable, user-specified data, including sensor readings and device metadata. Smart Fleets can be used to highlight outliers, partition devices by geography, differentiate live devices from test devices, group devices needing upgrades or other attention, and more.

Importantly, because devices can belong to multiple Smart Fleets at once, the fleet admin can manage, manipulate and report on their devices through all these different business lenses at the same time. Combining Smart Fleets with Blues’ Notehub cloud API further extends the possibilities for automated fleet management and control.

Not every connected device is production-ready 100% of the time. Fleets to Exclude allow fleet admins to curate the outbound data streams from Blues’ cloud orchestration layer, removing the data within selected fleets from the specified data feed. For instance, if a collection of environmental sensors starts sending corrupted readings due to a calibration issue, Fleets to Exclude can instantly block those data from reaching the analytics platform. This prevents false alarms in maintenance dashboards and keeps operational decision-making accurate.

Batch Jobs automate device management at scale, accelerating tasks such as provisioning, configuration updates and report generation. Batch Jobs use a flexible encoding for each task and methodically apply that task to each device in the specified fleet. That means no more repetitive manual updates, fewer version mismatches and faster adoption of process improvements across fleets. By streamlining repetitive work, Batch Jobs boosts efficiency, ensures consistency and reduces errors across large deployments.

“Working with large fleets of connected devices reveals complexities that are not obvious early in development,” said Brandon Satrom, senior vice president at Blues. “Smart Fleets, Fleets to Exclude and Batch Jobs are powerful, easy to use tools that unlock fleet management at scale in the Blues environment. Extending these new fleet management capabilities with our Notehub API provides Blues customers with a full toolbox for fleet management, simplifying administration, reducing workload, minimising errors, accelerating deployment times and increasing data quality, all of which enable organisations to scale their IoT operations more efficiently and with greater control.”

Massachusetts-based Blues (blues.com) specialises in secure wireless connectivity, helping organisations transform their physical products and businesses to be centred on data and the delivery of data-fuelled intelligent services. Blues has customers across transportation, healthcare, energy and logistics in North America, Central America and Europe.