Notifications

(see notification user documentation

Notifications are messages that are sent to users. There several concerns when processing a notification:

  1. The message itself and how it is generated.
  2. Who receives the messages.
  3. Mechanism for sending the message (Twilio SMS, SMTP, etc)
  4. State of the notification
    1. sequencing through a list of users
    2. tracking if it was acknowledged and by who
  5. Distributed concerns (more than one SIOT instance processing notifications)
    1. Synchronization of notification state between instances.
    2. Which instance is processing the notification.

For now, we assume all notifications will be handled on a single SIOT instance (typically in the cloud) -- distributed aspects of notifications will implemented later.

Notifications can be initiated by:

  1. rules
  2. users sending notifications through the web UI

Notification Data Structures

Elsewhere in the system, configuration and sensor data are represented as Points. The Point data structure is optimized for synchronization and algorithms where simplicity and consistency allows us to easily process points with common code. But a Point does not have enough fields to represent a message or notification. We could encode the message as JSON in the Point text field, but it would be nice to have something a little more descriptive. Additionally, all notifications and messages should be stored in the time series database so there is a history of everything that was sent.

Time series databases like InfluxDB store records with the following attributes:

  • timestamp
  • measurement (similar to collection, bucket, or table in other databases)
  • keys (string only, indexed)
  • values (can be a variety of data types: float, integer, string, boolean)

Notifications will be handled by two data structures:

  • Notification
    • typically generated by a rule or a node that is directly sending a message
    • stored in main database as they may contain state that needs to be processed over time
  • Message
    • an individual message to a user (SMS, Email, voice call)
    • stored in time series database as they are transient

Notifications are initiated (as is all write data in the system) by sending a message through NATS. The typical flow is as follows:

rule -> notification -> msg