How to stay current on flespi news, updates, and downtimes

Flespi is a highly dynamic platform and you may wonder how to stay in the know of all upcoming changes, updates, maintenance works, and downtimes.

One of the core principles we follow in flespi development is continuous integration — new features are delivered to the customers as soon as they are developed and tested. This way the customers don't need to wait for the scheduled release to get the desired feature and can have a reported bug fixed at no time.

The two main resources where we notify users about upcoming changes or critical past events are the forum and the NOC Telegram channel (see the links below).

You can also monitor the flespi platform's real-time metrics as well as uptime history on the Status page.

We recommend to subscribe to the forum threads related to the relevant protocols and platform modules you rely on (API, MQTT, etc.) to never miss an important change and have sufficient time for any necessary fixes. 

You can subscribe to the forum thread via RSS link and receive update directly into your email inbox. Notifications system in the forum is designed such a way that it will not send you a new notification about thread activity if you didn't read the thread, to prevent spamming. That's why please make sure that after receiving notification from corresponding thread you visit the forum and mark it as a read.

Changelog posts of channel protocols, stream protocols, and plugin types are also delivered inside the flespi platform: in realtime to the 'flespi/message/gw/channel-protocols/{id}/changelog' MQTT topic (same for 'stream-protocols' and 'plugin-types'), so you can subscribe to them or attach a webhook. The accumulated history of posts is available with the 'GET /gw/channel-protocols/{selector}/changelog-posts' REST request.

Each flespi system (telematics hub, MQTT broker, storage, platform, and AI) also maintains its own changelog feed inside the platform, aggregating new posts of the system and its applications: for example, analytics, tachograph, Toolbox, TrackIt, MapView, and SetBox posts arrive in the telematics hub feed, and each post carries the 'name' of the specific changelog it belongs to. Subscribe to the 'flespi/message/gw/changelog' MQTT topic (same for 'storage', 'mqtt', 'platform', and 'ai') to receive such posts in realtime, or fetch the accumulated history with the 'GET /gw/changelog-posts' REST request. Both the MQTT topics and the REST methods are accessible with any token of the account, including ACL tokens.

If we or our uplink provider have scheduled maintenance works that we expect to cause downtime, we schedule updates and warn our customers in advance via NOC.

All messages posted to NOC channel automatically re-posted inside the flespi platform to MQTT topic 'flespi/message/platform/customer/announce' as JSON messages with type="noc" and text="NOC message text". Additional messages to this topic published with different type - announcements from flespi news channel (type="news") and new panel version notices (type="panel", which carry a version field and no text). To receive only NOC and news posts, filter by type (for example "type=='noc'||type=='news'") so the textless panel notices are excluded. The topic is accessible with any token of the account, including ACL tokens, no extra permissions required. You can create webhook on this topic with filter "type=='noc'" (or without any filter to test it first) and forward such messages into your internal system. Keep in mind that this method relies on flespi components availability such as flespi connectivity from outside world, MQTT broker and webhooks so it may not signal problems immediately but only when flespi is back online. For all cases Telegram NOC channel is the only instant source of the truth but for most problems and notifications this method will work correctly and instantly.

Announcements and changelog posts are delivered to every flespi account including all subaccounts. If you forward them into external systems with webhooks or MQTT subscriptions configured in multiple subaccounts, filter by "cid" or keep such forwarding in a single account to avoid duplicate notifications.

We also aggregate the major changes, updates, and improvements that happened each month and publish an extensive monthly changelog.