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Checking data availability with the Timeout module

Sometimes data delivery to your Flows is controlled by the source systems, for example: 

  • Data is published on a MQTT broker
  • Tag data is pushed through an OPC UA subscription
  • A file is added in a watch folder
  • A HTTP request is received

In these cases it is often of interest to monitor the expected delivery of data, e.g. “sensor values should be updated every second” or “at least one file should be added each hour”, so that you can get notified when data stops arriving.

The Timeout module is your remedy here. It can monitor that data arrives as you expect, and when not it will fire a message that you can use to take actions, like sending a notification. The Timeout module can operate as a single timer that just checks that any message arrives, but it can also operate with individual timers for each value on a selected property. The latter mode can for example be used to monitor any number of tags from an OPC UA server, as long as they are all expected to deliver data at the same rate. This gives you a really powerful monitoring tool in a single module!

About the author

Goran Appelquist (Ph.D) | CTO

Göran has 20 years experience in leading technology teams. He’s the lead architect of our end-to-end solution and is extremely focused in securing the lowest possible Total Cost of Ownership for our customers.

"Hidden Lifecycle (employee) cost can account for 5-10 times the purchase price of software. Our goal is to offer a solution that automates and removes most of the tasks that is costly over the lifecycle.

My career started in the academic world where I got a PhD in physics by researching large scale data acquisition systems for physics experiments, such as the LHC at CERN. After leaving academia I have been working in several tech startups in different management positions over the last 20 years.

In most of these positions I have stood with one foot in the R&D team and another in the product/business teams. My passion is learning new technologies, use it to develop innovative products and explain the solutions to end users, technical or non-technical."