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Version: Torizon OS 6.x.y

Device and Fleet Management

Introduction

In this article, you will learn how to manage devices and fleets of devices for easy updates with the Torizon Cloud.

Prerequisites

Device Management

The Torizon Cloud provides two convenient ways to provision new devices to the service.

  • Single Device: if you want to provision a single device, you should use the single command provided in the web interface.
  • Multiple devices: if you need to provision multiple devices without adding another step to your production process, you can provide provisioning data to the image that will be installed. After installation, the devices will provision themselves automatically.

Accounts & Provisioned Devices

When you provision a device to your account, it is registered under this account's repository. You can learn more about repositories and accounts in the Repository Sharing article section.

Best Practices for Device Provisioning

You can make your devices available to different users by leveraging the repository sharing feature. However, if you want to change the device provisioning ownership to a new account, you will have to reprovision the device to the new account.

Make sure to consider this aspect when provisioning and organizing your devices and fleets. We highly recommend you to create a proper corporate-managed account to provision your devices, avoding usage of personal accounts (for evaluation purposes this can be neglected).

Network Requirement

The devices need to have internet access for provisioning.

If you are in a restricted network, you will need to configure it so the Torizon infrastructure addresses are reachable by the devices. The network domain and port for accessing the Torizon Cloud by a device for provisioning are the following:

  • To provision a device: app.torizon.io on port 443.
  • Provisioned device after June 2022: dgw.torizon.io on port 443.
  • Provisioned device before June 2022: ota-ce.torizon.io on port 443. Be aware that these devices will be migrated to the dwg.torizon.io domain in the future.

If you have an existing device and want to check which gateway it is connecting to, look at /var/sota/import/gateway.url.

Provisioning a single device

You just need to run a single command on the device command-line either from the serial port or SSH.

This command provides the authentication token. On the device, it registers, downloads, and installs credentials. By executing this command on the device, the system will securely authenticate with the Toradex OTA backend.

Command to provision a new device

Device successfully provisoned

Provisioning multiple devices

This is the recommended way to provision devices during production. You can learn all about it in our production programming and provisioning at scale article.

With the device provisioned, the fleet manager can update the containers, operating system, and associate it to fleets.

Polling Time

By default, Torizon OS is configured to poll the OTA server once every 5 minutes. That may sound like a lot of time for evaluation, but it is a reasonable default configuration for production. You can set a custom polling time.

To read more about the software that runs on the target device, see the Technical Overview of Torizon Cloud article.

Device Status

It is easy to check the provisioned devices status regarding their connection to the Torizon Cloud. Check the image below:

See the status of the devices

The indicated icon shows different collours according to the time passed since the last polling. When mouse-hovering on top of the indicated icon, corresponding messages are displayed.

  • Green - "reported online x minutes ago": when less than 6 minutes have passed since the last polling cycle.
  • Yellow - "reported online x minutes ago": when more than 6 minutes and less the 9 minutes have passed since the last polling cycle.
  • Red - "this device hasn't been online for a while": when more than 9 minutes have passed since the last polling cycle.

Updating Multiple Devices by Creating a Fleet

The Torizon Cloud provides a flexible way to create a Fleet of devices. The creation of Fleets facilitates the secure update process of Multiple Devices.

On the Fleet menu, you can check the devices in each fleet and check their status. You can also add and remove devices from fleets.

See the device added to the fleet

Currently, it is only possible to add devices of the same type to a fleet. As an example, you cannot have a fleet composed of Apalis iMX8 and Verdin iMX8M Mini devices. You would need to create one fleet for each of them. If you need to have a heterogeneous fleet, please contact us and mention this article.



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