A platform release from Ohio-based Losant focuses on its edge compute platform features, with added support for a new protocol, the ability to run edge workflows shipped with hardware, and additional improvements to the development experience.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) allows for reading and writing characteristics of devices connected on a local network. The protocol is a popular method for interacting with a variety of hardware: IoT sensors, printers, smart appliances, networking equipment and servers.

While network administrators originally shied away from SNMP due to its security concerns, many are now adopting it as a local communication method for the IoT due to its ubiquity across a wide variety of devices and improved security features in later versions.

With this release, the Losant Edge Agent can now act as an SNMP manager, initiating requests to other devices on the network using a suite of new workflow nodes:

• SNMP: Get Subtree node – Reads values from all devices beneath a given root OID.
• SNMP: Read node – Allows for reading values from one or more OIDs.
• SNMP: Write node – Allows for writing values to one or more OIDs.

The nodes support all three major versions of SNMP, including the far more secure version three, which supports authentication as well as encryption.

As for SNMP traps, it is usually possible to listen for those using a UDP trigger listening on port 162, which is the default behaviour for SNMP-supported devices to publish events.

“Adding support for this protocol opens up Losant’s edge compute functionality to a wide new breadth of device types, and we’re excited to see what our users build with these new workflow nodes,” said Dylan Schuster, Losant’s product director.

The release also includes the ability to execute edge workflows that are stored on the device’s file system directly, as opposed to requiring a deployment from the cloud platform first.

Before this update, it was impossible to run edge workflows without first connecting to the Losant MQTT broker at least one time to receive a set of workflows to run. With the ability to load workflows from disk, this opens up a number of possibilities; for example:

• Edge agents can now take advantage of on-demand device registration, where an on-disk workflow can communicate with an experience endpoint to create a device in the application, generate an access key and secret, and return those to the agent in the endpoint reply.
• Hardware that is part of a product rollout can start functioning, in some capacity, before receiving one or more edge workflows to execute on the device.
• Some users have written application workflows that automatically deploy edge workflows on registration. Those workflows can be removed in favour of including one or more of the edge workflows on disk.

In the firm’s last platform update, it introduced changes to the development lifecycle to streamline the process of building, deploying and debugging edge workflows. With this release, it has added a couple of additional improvements to close the loop on the process.

First, after deploying a new workflow version, users will be greeted with a modal displaying all the devices that are receiving the new deployment as well as their status, whether the deployment has reached the device yet. From here, they can launch the Live Look modal to debug the workflow immediately on their hardware.

Also, it is now possible to bulk-delete workflow versions from the editor’s Versions tab. This will only delete versions that are not currently deployed or are awaiting deployment.

“We added this feature because active edge workflow development usually results in a large number of workflow versions being created in a short period of time, which can clutter up a given workflow’s versions very quickly,” said Schuster.

The release also comes with some smaller feature improvements.