Tributech Node
The Tributech Node is the central layer of our Tributech Platform where every data will be collected, secured by our Tributech Agents.
A Tributech Node can also be used for the following scenarios (excerpt):
- Provide external application access to read the available data to provide customized user experience, see API Integration
- Agent management, configuration or sending commands for an agent
- Verify Data
- Manage Webhooks
Overview
The following process overview shows how the Tributech Node interacts with the connected Tributech Agents and the configuration, data flow.
Tributech Agents
The Tributech Agents are connected to our node via an MQTT broker which is secured by TLS to provide a secure communication channel. The protocol provides us the possibility to have a near real time bidirectional communication with our agents and apply configuration or issue commands fast.
REST API
The Tributech Node is built with the API-first approach in mind. So every functionality is available via our REST API which enables external parties to execute operations like (API Integration/API Usage):
- Fetching the data provided by the agents
- Trigger the validation of their data
- Fetching the validation results of their data
- Executing commands which will be handled by our agents
- Configure the given Tributech Agent Sources and Tributech Agents
- Manage the available DTDL Models within your Node
This operations require an authorization process that follows the OAuth 2.0 specification and will support the client credential flow and the authorization code flow.
⚠️ Currently we don't support any user/group permissions and will only handle authorization against our REST API.
Webhooks
We also provide a push-based notification system via Webhooks. External actors are able to subscribe to predefined events and add their url where the events should be sent to. To prevent spoofing attacks we attach a HMAC signature to our events within the HTTP Headers.
The list of events types can be found here or received via the API. The API also allows the customer to subscribe and manage webhooks. This enables external parties to implement a push-based system, within their application, to react to certain events in our node.
DTDL Configuration
To configure our Tributech Agents we currently use the Digital Twins Definition Language Version 2 which is an open standard to describe real world applications or things. This enables us the have a semantic description and configuration of our agents (e.g. configure Agent).
There is also the possibility that customers may upload their own customized models (via our REST API) to create a context between the ingested data and their application to unlock analytics or machine learning capabilities.
➡️ See our current DTDL Models on Github.
Deployment
Our Tributech node is using Kubernetes as orchestration platform, where we provide several components to enable the full functionality of our Tributech Node.
We provide an HELM Chart to ease the setup of our configuration. It is not publicly available so please contact our support team for further Information.