Introduction to Data Connectors

A quick introduction to what Data Connectors are and their benefits.

Overview

Data Connectors, which are essentially webhooks with added features, are designed to reliably forward your data to external services in real-time. While we store your data in the DT Cloud for 31 days, continuously streaming data without the need for a REST API can, in many custom integrations, be useful.

Data Connectors can be summarized in a few steps.

1. A sensor sends a data event to DT Cloud via a Cloud Connector.

2. DT Cloud uses the Data Connector to forward the events to your cloud.

3. Your cloud acknowledges that the event was received.

Each event is sent as an HTTPS POST request with a JSON payload. Depending on the sensor type, the fields contained in the payload may differ. A list of all event types can be found in the Events reference.

Features

Data Connectors have properties that make them particularly well suited for forwarding your sensor data from DT Cloud to an external service with minimal effort.

At-Least-Once Guarantee

Data Connectors have a retry policy that guarantees all events will be pushed at least once for up to 12 hours. All events received by DT Cloud are put in a dedicated per-Data Connector queue. Messages are only removed from this queue once acknowledged or if the event is older than 12 hours. See the retry policy for more details.

Low Latency

Data Connectors give you the lowest possible end-to-end latency from the Sensor to your cloud. DT Cloud will create one HTTPS POST request for every event we receive from the sensor. We do not introduce artificial wait states to aggregate events, keeping latency as low as possible regardless of sensor count.

Security

All events sent by a Data Connector to an external service are encrypted using TLS with the addition of a signature secret that can be used to verify both the origin and content integrity. We recommend using signature secrets with Data Connectors in a production environment. See Advanced Configuration.

High Scalability

DT Cloud will never wait for one HTTPS POST request to complete before sending the next. A new event will always be sent instantly to your cloud, running as many HTTPS POST requests in parallel as there are events at any given moment.