The Internet of Things, also known as IoT, is gaining moment, it’s a technology that is living its peak and is expected in the near and distant future to continue giving much to talk about.

For companies focused on obtaining the greatest efficiency in processes, this type of systems are fundamentals, as they allow monitoring, verifying that all processes are working correctly and even taking action on certain processes.

The measurement device it’s now as important as the measure itself.

The importance of this technology is so great that an IoT device can become a fundamental part of any process. Therefore, it is no longer only the tasks that the device is performing that are important. The equipment itself also needs to be monitored, because if it is damaged at the right time, it could cause critical problems in the development of an activity.

Why monitor the internet of things?

Because of their simplicity and sometimes the low cost, the devices designed for the IoT can become one of the weakest links in the chain of many processes. Therefore, keeping them controlled and monitored, can mean a significant saving. Not only economic but also psychological. On the other hand, as technology grows and becomes more important in most sectors, it is also becoming one of the preferred victims of hackers. You can continuously read articles about this type of equipment, which are victims of attacks, to inject some kind of code and then be used as a tool in major attacks like zombies.

As it is not the same to have a Raspberry Pi in your house than in space, just as you monitor the servers in which you store the most important data for your company or from which you control your processes, the monitoring of IoT equipment becomes essential. With that in mind and knowing the possibilities of tools based on Zabbix and Grafana, where we can alarm in a flexible way and even act according to the measures obtained and even do actions according to them, it becomes easier than ever to keep the IoT devices working properly.

How can I protect myself?

In the market, we can find a wide variety of types of equipment, there are even many companies that choose to create their own hardware as the documentation is pretty extensive. Therefore, we will divide them into four groups depending on their technology and the level of information we can get from them.

Devices based on general hardware (e.g. RaspberryPi, Beaglebone)

This is going to be the most common case for tailor-made solutions. Due to its more generalist architecture, its monitoring will be simpler, as it will allow us to do practically anything we want. Normally they usually use complete operating systems, so we will have the option of applying solutions similar to those seen in larger equipment such as servers. In systems with more complete architectures such as RaspberryPi, we can go even further and check internal parameters such as processor temperatures or power supply voltage with very simple commands:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ /opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp 
temp=56.9 °C 
 
pi@raspberrypi:~ $ vcgencmd get_throttled 
throttled=0x20000 

Controlled embedded devices (based on ESP8266, ESP32 and similar)

Within the low-cost internet things, the components used by excellence are the chips ESP8266 and ESP32, due to their connection possibilities and low cost, they have become widely used devices.

Unlike the previous category, you can’t see complete operating systems, so we don’t have the ability to run recognized software. On the other hand, these devices usually use RTOS, a very small operating system designed to be executed in this type of hardware, which will allow us to obtain some data such as the CPU load or the internal temperature itself.

#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C" {
#endif
uint8_t temprature_sens_read();
#ifdef __cplusplus
}
#endif
uint8_t temprature_sens_read();

Code for reading the internal temperature of an ESP32

Proprietary Equipment

Due to the wide variety of equipment that can exist within this category, classifying them is very complicated. Depending on the manufacturer, we will have left some things open or others, and if we do not have some documentation about they can become very difficult to monitorize.
Be that as it may, we will always have the possibility of monitoring your network traffic, which will help us with the main problems we had before, as it will allow us to know what our device communicates with and how often. Giving us information about what they are doing and if they are doing it correctly.

Summary

There are many types of internet devices for things that can flood our factories, warehouses or stores. From sensors for basic measurements such as temperature, to small actuators.
The problem is that all of them are susceptible to run out or even be hacked and compromise our processes.

Whether through simple analysis of network traffic from our access point without having to modify anything in our devices, or with more ingenious solutions to make a preventive analysis of problems that may happen to our equipment, monitoring is a necessary step for the proper use of your devices designed for the internet of things. At Muutech we take monitoring very seriously, and now that IoT is more important than ever it is time to take them into account.