For the Axeda® Gateway, Axeda® Connector, and Axeda IDM Agents, the Ping Rate defines how often an Agent sends a contact message to ("pings") the Axeda® Platform. A ping rate interval for these agents can be any number of minutes or fraction of minutes (such as a ping rate of .25 for every 15 seconds). For example, if an agent has a Ping Rate set to 15 minutes that agent pings, or contacts, the Platform every 15 minutes. When the agent contacts the Platform, the Platform can respond with any waiting communications for that agent, such as updates, actions and commands, packages, scripts to run, and so forth.
For wireless M2M assets, the ping rate represents how often the asset polls the Axeda Platform. For wireless assets that are configured to use the Shoulder Tap delivery method, the Ping Rate could be 0, because the assets are configured NOT to poll the Platform (poll rate set to NULL), but only to respond to shoulder tap messages from the Platform. For wireless assets that are configured to poll the Platform once a week, the Ping Rate is displayed in their Asset dashboards as the number of seconds in a week.
Note: A ping rate of 0 typically means that the asset can never be "Missing." However, for M2M shoulder-tap assets, the task that checks for missing assets checks the table of shoulder tap messages to determine if an asset is Missing. If the number of retries for a shoulder tap message for an asset has been exhausted and the asset has not responded to the shoulder tap, the task sets the status of the asset to Missing. If you never want these assets to show a status of Missing, go to the Missing Assets page of the Model wizard and select the option, "Don't consider assets of this model as missing." See also Missing Assets.
Each asset provides its own ping rate when it registers with the Platform for the first time. Note that if an asset is created in the Platform BEFORE it has registered with the Platform, its ping rate is 0. Once the asset registers, the appropriate ping rate appears in the Asset dashboard. If the asset is configured NOT to poll the Platform, the rate remains at 0. The Platform reads the ping rate set on the asset and saves it to the Platform with other asset configuration properties.
o Finding an asset's ping rate
You can view the ping rate set for an asset from the
Axeda® Service
application
Asset dashboard.
o Changing an asset's ping rate
You can change the ping rate set for an asset that is running an Axeda
Agent (Gateway, Connector, or IDM)
in the Axeda® Service
application
by creating a Set Ping
Rate action in the Configuration application. Once the action exists,
it is available to run in the Actions module of the Asset
dashboards for assets to which you have privileges. In addition, the
SetPingRate action can be used in rules. This action is not available
for wireless assets.
The Platform can determine that an asset is active and online when the asset is "pinging" the Platform as defined.
Axeda Gateway and Axeda Connector provide a version of the Lightweight Ping protocol that reduces the size of the registration and status ping messages from approximately 2KB (a ping through a proxy server and using SSL) to 300-400 bytes. This smaller ping is referred to as "Lightweight Ping Version 2 (lwPingV2)." Use this protocol instead of the Lightweight Ping V1 if you want to use an SSL port for data and a non-SSL port for registration and status messages. For details about the Lightweight Ping protocol, refer to the Axeda Gateway User's Guide or the Axeda Connector User's Guide.