Monitoring device activity is essential for maintaining a healthy IoT infrastructure. Ubidots allows you to set up alerts when a device becomes inactive, helping you diagnose potential malfunctions, connection errors, or low battery issues promptly.
This guide will walk you through creating an inactive device alert in Ubidots.
Requirements
Active Ubidots account with a paid license.
1. Creating an inactive device alert
1.1. Triggers
To begin, head to the “data” tab →"Events" and hover over the “+” button, located at the upper right corner of the screen, and create a conditional event, global event, or scheduled event depending on your needs.
Once the event modal pops up, you’ll find yourself in the first stage of configuration, where you’ll set up the logic of the triggers. This is where we’ll configure our inactive device alert.
Click on the “+ add trigger” or “+ add OR group” buttons and select “inactivity”. By default, a newly created event loads with a value based trigger created, but you can either delete or configure it as well if it fits your needs.
Select one variable per conditional expression. Multiple variables can be added using AND (“+ add trigger”)/OR (“+ add OR group”) conditionals.
Choose the amount of time that the variable can be inactive for before the event is triggered. To do this, select a numerical value in the “inactivity time” field and then specify whether that value represents minutes, hours, or days by selecting the option you need in the “time frame” dropdown.
1.2. Actions
After finishing all the steps in the “triggers” tab and clicking on “next”, you’ll move onto the “actions” tab. There, you’ll be able to select and configure the action that will be triggered when the event is activated.
Click on the “+ add action” button to start this process. These are the options you can choose from:
For a detailed explanation on how each of the actions work and how to configure them, visit their respective article (linked above).
1.3. Settings
After completing the action configuration and clicking on “next”, you’ll proceed to the final step, the “settings” tab. There, you’ll identify your event and define its active windows.
Start this stage by naming your event and, optionally, giving it a description so that it’s easy to distinguish from other events later on.
Another optional step is to use a tag on the event. This is a great tool to control what your end users see in your app. In this case, for instance, you could decide that your end user sees one event, but not another, using tags. Learn more about tags here.
Determine the activity window in which the events should be executed. An event can have multiple active windows by clicking on the “+ add window button” and configuring them correspondingly. To learn more about how and when an event is activated, head to this guide.