Get insight into your orchestration data

A challenge for working with IoT Explorer has been a lack of insight into the actual data driving the orchestrations. You set up your variables, define some rules, turn on your IoT devices and swing over to the traffic tab to watch the states shift and … nothing happens.

(Note: Gru is not the property of Salesforce)

What would you do? Previously you would have to bounce out of IoT Explorer and find some other means to match up the actual data versus the expected results. Some developers have created logs via triggers or Process Builder. Personally, I’ve had to go to the device layer to see what is being sent over the wire.

In Summer’18, you are able to just go to the the tracker configuration icon in the upper right:

Enter the specific key of an incoming event being used by this orchestration.  In this case, I’m using a known device ID:

Once started you will get a detailed list of events coming into the orchestration and if it matched your rules or not:

If you think your device should be triggering a state change and it is not matching the rule, you can drill right down to the specific JSON data in question:

Having to hop out of IoT Explorer to having a direct view into the incoming data and how the rules respond should result in a dramatic reduction of time spent debugging. Since you can define the specific key value, you are only getting the data you want to monitor and not the potentially overwhelming deep well of IoT data devices can generate. You can also filter down to optionally see things like errors.

Get started quickly with the IoT Explorer Quick Start

While some people may literally have IoT hardware randomly strewn across our homes (Maybe shoved into soda bottles and LEGOs), many haven’t taken that plunge yet. If you want to see a sample of connecting a smart device to Salesforce IoT, head over to Trailhead and give the IoT Explorer Quick Start a try. This Quick Start uses an HTML5 application running on Heroku to mimic the behavior of a smart thermostat. You can easily control the “actual” and desired temperatures to see them reflected within Salesforce IoT. To see the new trackers in action, sign up for a Summer’18 org if you don’t already have access to one. The key value you see in this article, “CUCGRITU3RVWKUL8,” is the value we use for the smart thermostat’s device ID.

About the author

Josh Birk is a Developer Evangelist at Salesforce and has a history of wrangling strings, cats, digital assistants and robots. He’ll be at Connections in June, Sydney Down Under Dreamin’ in July, and Dreamforce in September.