I work for overlock, we're trying to build a debugging tool which specifically addresses the unique needs of distributed systems. We're really looking for early feedback and for companies who are deploying IoT systems. Happy to answer any questions!
Congratulations on your beta launch! Really interesting.
Some questions: FAQ reads that channel from devices to Overlock employs MQTT(S). I guess that means MQTT-SN, using TLS layer for authentication. Which auth methods do you support? Do you support validation of the client and the server? Can the gateway act as such also for Overlock or do devices need to open the MQTT channel directly?
That should probably be written as secure-MQTT, I'll get that changed. So we are just using vanilla MQTT over TLS.
We're currently using token-based authentication but certainly open to supporting other options. Did you have any suggestions?
I'm not quite sure what you mean about validation? In general, the gateway will already be in communication with the end devices over whatever protocol they're using. So it makes sense to log state etc. from the gateway for those devices. In that sense, the gateway does act as a gateway for overlock.
What's your pricing like? This is the one thing that I'm always cautious about with these kinds of services as most of them are designed with web in mind. This lends the pricing to be per node/machine, which makes it untenable for an IoT deployment.
Yeah, you're completely right. We've designed everything else from the ground up to be for IoT, so that follows for pricing too. We're not quite ready to announce it just yet though.
In an IoT deployment, an issue that is detected on one device (e.g. an exception on the server) may actually originate on an entirely different device (e.g. the end device sends some incorrect data). Overlock collects together the state of all the devices involved in a given request and the associated logs in one place so that you can track the error back to where it originated.
