2023 started with a super-active month at a startup-like pace. Let me prove it with numbers — we announced the integration of 6 new protocols in flespi and published 4 articles in our blog.
We integrated AOVX, BWS IoT, Topin, Morey Slap-n-Track, Tbit, Goldstar by Spireon.
Followed by our roadmap to 2023 I recommend you to look in the rearview mirror and learn what devices and tracking equipment manufacturers were the most popular on flespi in 2022. Based on this statistics, we decided to make a deeper dive into a few manufacturers from that list and overview their most fast-growing devices from a flespi perspective. And already published such an overview for Topflytech with more manufacturers coming in the next few months.
What’s even more important and useful for most of our users — we added source information for each flespi parameter for protocols. For example now you may self-answer the question about which AVL ID corresponds to each flespi parameter in Teltonika protocol. Or, for example, which flespi parameters are generated from which reports in Queclink protocol. Soon we are planning on extending this information and generating device-specific lists of message parameters and their source information.
Motivated by a quickly growing demand for our services, we decided to extend the raw traffic storage from 2 MB to 8 MB and from 10 days up to 30 days per device. This storage is available for all flespi users for free.
We ended January 2023 at a 99.9973% monthly uptime mark. On January 4 we experienced three short service interruptions with a total duration of 70 seconds. Part of our database-related systems were affected by the unusual load, which we quickly detected and patched the system to prevent such cases in the future.
As I wrote in our yearly roadmap, we will install our services in an additional datacenter in order to implement RAID-1-like datacenter redundancy. The datacenter, new servers, and network infrastructure are now ready and in February we will apply the change to our networking system in order to connect to the two datacenters. At this moment it is just about the standard routing, but the change itself is quite significant and involves the replacement of router hardware on the path. As usual, we and our uplink provider will do as much as possible to prevent any negative effect of these changes on our uptime. We will post on our NOC before the traffic is routed via new routers.
There were also a few updates to our analytics module. We added a distinct method of counter, defined a new counter overflow event when any single counter size is exceeding the allowed and implemented a new previous(“param-name”) function. All details about these changes are posted into the analytics changelog.
Another nice feature we added is the possibility to search messages in HelpBox. This feature will be especially appreciated by those who have a multi-year communication history with us.
For those who are interested in the current telematics market trends, I recommend reading the CES overview by Sergei Leuchanka who visited this event and defined his own conclusion about what should be expected soon in the IoT and Telematics business. And another conference he visited in January was Micromobility World 2023 which influenced Sergei's opinion on where the scooter and bike sharing market is moving to. Definitely worth reading.
For those who are always in trouble with time slot availability, I recommend at least to watch Sergei’s interview at CES 2023 with the most significant key points highlighted.
In February, we have two significant ongoing projects which are defined in our roadmap: redundant datacenter and the new Automation module. None of these will be deployed in February, however our team is focused on both of them. Stay healthy, keep warm, and prepare for the coming spring (for those, who like us, are in the Northern Hemisphere)!