Pachube Notifo Alerts

This application uses Pachube triggers to push data into third party services, to show how easy it is to use triggers to provide deep links into third party services for real time notifications of changes to your Pachube feeds.

This demo application was implemented in Ruby using Sinatra, but would be trivial to implement in any other language.

Notifo is a cool service for sending real time notifications to your mobile phone, which we've hooked up to the existing Pachube triggers (webhooks) via this standalone web application, which should allow you to send real time notifications of feed updates, direct to your iPhone (Android devices are also largely supported, but the Notifo app for Android isn't quite as polished as the iPhone version).

Please note, this app is currently being offered as a free beta service, so we make no warranties of its fitness for any particular use, and indeed offer no guarantees that all notifications generated will be delivered. If your triggers generate very large amounts of outgoing notifications, your use of the service may be temporarily limited, but should this happen, we'll try and send you a message informing you of the restriction, and the restriction will automatically be removed.

Register

Before you can use this service, you will need to install the free Notifo app. Currently this is available for iPhone , and in beta for Android devices. For more details, please see the Mobile Apps tab.

Once the app is installed and you have your Notifo username, you can register to use the trigger delivery service below.

Clicking register should subscribe your Notifo account to our service, and send you out a device secret (like a password). You will need to keep a record of this secret in a safe place, as you'll need it when setting up your triggers on Pachube.


Device Secret

Registering your device should have automatically sent you out a message containing a randomly generated Device Secret. To actually get notifications being sent to your device via this app, you'll need to keep a record of this Device Secret somewhere safe, as we can't recover this at our end.

However, if you either don't receive a Device Secret when registering, or have lost it, you can request the generation of a new one below.

You are free to create a new Device Secret at any time, but please be aware this will permanently invalidate the previous one, so any triggers still using that value will fail, and the old Device Secret cannot be recovered..

If you never receive your Device Secret then please contact us at support@pachube.com and we'll try and resolve your issues.


Usage

To use this App, you should have already installed the Notifo app for your mobile device, created a Notifo account and registered your Notifo username with us, and this process should have delivered a Device Secret to your phone.

To begin actually using the app, you need to create a Pachube trigger using the details obtained in the previous steps.

  1. Make sure you have your Notifo username and the Device Secret sent to your phone to hand.
  2. Go to one of your feed datastreams and create a new trigger (described here).
  3. For the trigger url, you need to add a url like the following:
    http://notifo.pachube.com/users/<username>/deliver?secret=<device_secret> where <username> is your Notifo username, and <device_secret> is the string that we sent out to you via Notifo.
  4. Run a debug test of the trigger you have just created, and if all has worked properly, you should receive a notification direct to your device pretty quickly.

Mobile Apps

  • The Notifo app for Iphone version 2, is the most developed of the mobile apps, and is currently available for free download from the App Store.
  • A Notifo app for Android is currently in beta testing. It's not currently in the Android Market, but the beta is available for free download direct from the Notifo site. It requires a device with Android 2.2+, and you must be able to install apps outside of the Android Market.
  • The Notifo mobile apps page lists some other devices that apps are currently under development for, but none appear to be available for download at this time. Please check with them for details.

FAQ

Q. What usage limits are there to the service?
A. As this app is just being offered for beta testing, we don't have any hard limits in place at the moment, so it does somewhat depend on how much demand there is for the service. At the moment we are looking at a restriction based on an allocated amount of notifications you are permitted in any one month. The numbers for these allocated notification amounts is not set in stone; but in general, provided your trigger doesn't send more than a few hundred trigger events during the course of a month, you will probably be able to use the service unimpeded. This means we'd probably advise against using a 'change' type trigger in this circumstance, as say your feed is being updated once every 10 seconds with changing data, then a 'change' type trigger will be fired for every one of those events, so you'll burn through your soft allocation of messages within the first hour of operation.
Q. What happens if I breach my usage allocation?
A. Nothing serious will happen should your usage of the system breach your allocation. In fact, all that will happen is that you will stop receiving notifications for the remainder of the month, but this restriction will automatically be released as we enter a new month. There would be no need to contact us about this, unless you wanted to request a larger allowance.
Q. Can I pay for a larger allowance of notification messages?
A. Possibly, though we haven't given too much thought to how that might work at this stage. Best bet would be to contact us and discuss your needs.
Q. Will you notify me if my usage breaches the monthly allocation?
A. If your notification usage breaches the limit we have in place, then we'll try and send you a message to inform you of this. At there moment there is a known issue with Android devices, where they do not seem to receive Notifo messages properly (note they receive the notifications fine), so Android devices might not receive the warning properly.
Q. I didn't receive my Device Secret, what now?
A. If you didn't receive a Device Secret apon registration, then please contact us at support@pachube.com and we'll attempt to manually regenerate and send you out a new Device Secret.