New features specific to self-hosted deployments

This page cumulates all the new ThingPark Enterprise features brought by the different 8.0.x software releases, which are specific to self-hosted deployments (i.e. not applicable to SaaS). See the 8.0 changelog to know more about the split of those features per maintenance release.

Platform compaction RDTP-21050 RDTP-18325

The scope of these features is to rework the MongoDB data model to reduce the footprint.

• Prior to release 8.0: The device traffic is stored in the DeviceHistory collection, which is a regular MongoDB collection containing 1 document per device packet. The DeviceHistory collection is the largest collection in MongoDB database: ~87% of the database size.

• Starting release 8.0: MongoDB's time series model is used to reduce the footprint.
  The DeviceHistory collection is replaced by the new time-series collection DeviceEvent, containing the device traffic. The default retention period is 35 days for packets without battery measurements and 1 year for uplink packets having battery measurements.
  Additionally, a new collection DeviceAsFailure is added in release 8.0, containing reports about the delivery status of uplink packets to external application servers over the tunnel interface. The default retention period of this collection is 35 days.

Thanks to this new data model (RDTP-21050), the MongoDB footprint and sizing requirements are divided by five.
This significant reduction brings substantial savings to the platform's hosting cost, significantly reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Another feature brought in this release (RDTP-18325): the optimization of the hourly/daily aggregation of the base station's system load and backhaul statistics. With this feature, the BaseStationHistory collection is replaced by a new collection "BaseStationAggregation" which requires 24 times less documents than BaseStationHistory.

Key customer benefits

CAPEX/OPEX savings without compromising the system performance.

While the effective reduction factor depends on the traffic profile of each platform, here is the footprint reduction observed in our experimentation with a real database dump from one of ThingPark's regional SaaS platforms:

• Storage size / size in filesystem cache: -79% (8.91 GB -> 1.87 GB)
• Size in WiredTiger cache: -82% (24.02 GB -> 4.26 GB)

Feature activation

The features described above are automatically activated after upgrading to release 8.0.
However, to simplify the migration process and avoid too long service disruption during the upgrade maintenance window, only the LoRaWAN traffic history of the last 7 days preceding the upgrade is kept after upgrading.

Feature limitations

To optimize Wireless Logger's performances in the new MongoDB data model, starting release 8.0, users can see the traffic belonging to their own devices but they no longer see the roaming traffic forwarded by their gateways to their roaming partners, also known as fNS roaming traffic.