If your account has access to the PointPerfect service, the Thingstream Portal has two new ways to see what your Things are doing. The home page now has a map showing where your Things are connecting from, and the NTRIP session logs have a new layout that makes busy sessions much easier to read.
This article covers both, starting with the map and following it through to the logs.
- The map on the home page
- The Thing's details page
- NTRIP session logs
The map on the home page
The map appears if you have PointPerfect Flex Things or PointPerfect Global Things on your account. If you don't use PointPerfect, your home page looks the same as it always has.
To make room for the map, we moved and resized some of the existing widgets over to the left. Nothing has been removed.
Reading the map
Each dot on the map is a location, and the number inside it is how many Things are there.
The ring around the dot tells you how recently those Things had a session:
| Ring colour | Last session |
| Green | Within the last 15 minutes |
| Yellow | Between 15 minutes and a day ago |
| Red | A day or more ago |
Zooming in
Click a dot to zoom in on it, or use the zoom buttons on the map. As you zoom, groups break apart into smaller groups and eventually into individual Things.
If you hover over a dot that still contains more than one Thing, a small summary tells you how many Things are in it and how recent their activity is. For example, "two Things, both active in the last 15 minutes."
When a location has just one Thing, the number disappears from the dot. Click it and a card opens with:
- The name of the Thing
- When it was last seen
- Its last and previous fix status
"Last" is the most recent fix we have for that Thing, and that may be from a session that ended a while ago. It isn't necessarily live.
Keeping the map up to date
The map loads with the information that was current when you opened the page. It doesn't refresh by itself. The time of the last update is shown on the map, and you can select Refresh to bring it up to date.
You can also expand the map to a full-page view to look around more easily, then close it to go back to the home page.
The Thing's details page
Select View activity on the Thing's card to open its details page.
On the Activity tab you'll still see your billable usage. Below it you'll now see the last five NTRIP sessions for that Thing.
If a session is still active, you'll see the connected time counting up and the fix timeline changing as it happens. That makes it a handy place to check on a Thing that's connected right now.
Hover over the timeline to see what each colour means. The colours are the fix stages reported in the NMEA string from the Thing.
When the timeline is greyed out
You may see part of the timeline bar greyed out, with a message that timeline history isn't available. We show the last 20 fix updates for a session. If a session has more than that, we show the most recent 20 and grey out the earlier part to show something has been left out.
A normal session shouldn't have anywhere near 20 fix changes. A lot of them usually points to a Thing that is flipping back and forth between fix states. We may change the limit as we see how it's used.
NTRIP session logs
The logs are mainly there to help you debug. They show new sessions starting, moves between nodes, fix status changes and disconnects, whether the Thing closed the connection or it was ended by a concurrent connection.
The information is the same as before, but the new layout is much easier to work with, especially if you have lots of Things starting and stopping sessions and fix status changing all the time.
How the view is laid out
Down the left side is a list of your NTRIP sessions. Each one shows a short overview of its fix status changes, so you can spot the interesting ones without opening every session. Click any session to see what happened in it.
Jumping into the log from the timeline
On the Thing's details page, click a bar on the fix timeline. The log opens with the event you clicked already selected, so you land on what you were looking at instead of scrolling for it. You can also select View logs to open the log for a Thing's recent sessions.
Cutting out the noise
Some sessions have a huge number of fix changes. To see only when the session connected and disconnected, use the filter to hide the fix changes.
What you can see about a session
At the top of a session you'll find:
- Duration of the session
- Why it ended, for example a concurrent connection kicked it off, or the Thing closed it cleanly
- IP addresses involved
- Data used in the session
Digging into an entry
- Click a GGA string to see the NMEA sentence decoded into something readable.
- Click the maps link to see where the Thing was, without going back to the home page map.