Slowly stepping, day by day winter is passing by. Due to the covid-19 threat, life on the whole planet has changed and moved online. We are living now in a kind of suspended world waiting for the results of vaccination or until sunlight and warm weather help us to struggle with the virus. Here at flespi, we measure the effect of covid-19 on the business of our users with the simple mark — the number of support messages from our users in HelpBox. Given the numbers below looks like the worst month was November and starting from December the situation is improving:
Of course, we will continue to monitor this metric further but so far we keep fingers crossed as the business seems to slowly return to a normal life.
Another good news is our uptime in January. Both EU and RU regions operated with zero downtime and reached a 100% monthly uptime mark. We will do our best to keep it on the highest possible mark all year round. According to our statistics, the most popular reason for the downtime for us is network connectivity which is the responsibility of our uplink provider. Although we can not influence it directly, we will still keep our fingers on the pulse and negotiate possible issues to provide almost ideal uptime in any situation including DDoS attacks or routing hardware malfunction that may occur.
- As a followup to generic HTTP streams we introduced special stream protocols to the known GPS platforms: Wialon, GPSWOX, Traccar. With such special stream protocols, we hide some stream configuration and in the future will add more customization to make flespi-to-GPS-platform connection bidirectional. We suggest our users update the protocol for their streams to these GPS platforms.
- We integrated the new Autofon protocol into flespi.
- And the most important one — we finally migrated teltonika protocol to the pvmII engine which was the last protocol on the original version of pvm engine. It took us two years to completely rewrite the protocol parsing engine to a new version based on gathered experience and convert 70+ existing protocols one by one. And this is in parallel with our daily work providing the best possible interactive user support via HelpBox and solving all kinds of issues our users may have which often lays out of flespi responsibility.
- Toolbox — our primary diagnostic tool — received a bunch of updates to improve its UX and I suggest trying its powerful context menu over messages in various modes if you have not tried it yet. To make the Toolbox experience even better we accumulated the most important information about it in this KB article which we will keep up to date with time.
- flespi.io — our primary frontend application — received a dependency chart which is available inside the info tab of almost any flespi entity. Now you can quickly determine which device may report to which channel or analyze your subaccounts hierarchy.
In January we also held a big multi-day online meeting discussing where we should move further. I’m not ready yet to share all the details of what we decided, but we are quite confident in our product and its mission, in our target user audience, and their great and sometimes deeply technical questions.
Our primary focus in 2021 will be to make the life of our users simpler. To achieve whatever they need to achieve with three clicks instead of ten, integrate some features for native data transformations directly into the flespi channel/device/plugin so they do not need to run any custom script for it and so on. It does not mean we won’t release new features — we will of course. But our primary focus will be to remove various pains from our users and eliminate unnecessary hurdles in their development process. And together we will be much stronger during these crazy times and better prepared to grow further!