Incident Management for IoT Today
The Internet of Things (IoT) is starting to become very popular in the lives of people, and in enterprises globally. While it began as a novelty, more innovative and mission-critical use cases have been popping up lately. With the sheer variety of IoT devices available, the large amount of data that’s generated, and the various security vulnerabilities, companies that make IoT devices face a host of challenges that an incident resolution platform can help with. If you’re building an IoT system today, or have plans to build one in the future, it’s crucial to make your IoT system resilient and safe by investing in a solution for best practice incident resolution.
IoT Systems Need Integration
Because of the inherent complexity in IoT systems, end-to-end monitoring and integration are vital. With the existence of so many devices, all connected to the Internet and calling back home, what you have is a large amount of data just waiting to be used. When people use IoT devices, they have access to detailed usage patterns, such as time of use, frequency of use, specific features being used, and so on.
Integration with monitoring, logging, and ITSM tools make a big difference for IoT and can help developers of IoT devices heave a collective sigh of relief. A solution like PagerDuty makes it easier to organize the chaos by managing it all from a centralized dashboard and defining rules to customize event management behaviors and workflows.
This is especially true thanks to version 2.0 of the PagerDuty API. With this API, app notifications and alert management are a lot more seamless and customizable. Not only can you embed PagerDuty in your apps, but you can also embed your apps in PagerDuty. PagerDuty’s functionality can be extended by embedding your own dashboard to show the data that you need specifically. And with the Custom Event Transformer, with JavaScript, you can transform ordinary data into valuable and normalized incidents, showcasing the possibilities of custom integrations with PagerDuty.
Various IoT Integrations
There are many use cases where PagerDuty’s APIs have inspired innovation for IoT.
Resin.io
Resin.io, a client, server and device platform for IoT, uses PagerDuty to handle IoT incident management. A solution like Resin.io brings the principles and benefits of DevOps to the world of IoT. Other benefits of Resin.io include its use of the Linux kernel, which removes the need to use proprietary software for IoT devices. This makes development a lot more familiar.
Temboo
In addition, Temboo uses PagerDuty for parking management with the use of a sensor module. The IoT sensors can trigger alerts, allowing the sensor data to be used to find out if parking spaces are available. Temboo and PagerDuty can also be used to place sensors in a senior citizens’ living area so that their adult children can be informed of a call for help or lack of mobility.
AlertSite
Another tool, SmartBear’s AlertSite, helps with quality checks and API tests for IoT. It automates the execution of these tests instead of having to do them manually. In essence, it’s a unified synthetic monitoring platform that also contains alerting capabilities which send quick alerts directly from the testing location and emulates end user behavior. PagerDuty integrates with AlertSite to augment its monitoring capabilities with state-of-the-art, end-to-end incident resolution capabilities.
Preventing Abuse Before it Happens
Ethical hackers have shown time and time again how devices connected to the Internet could be exploited by various means, such as abusing features to cause trouble for users or using devices for DDoS attacks. Incident management is a critical layer of protection to warn IoT teams about the potential misuse of a device and trigger a coordinated response, especially if it performs unusually.
Incident management is not just something that should be seen as a goal. It’s incredibly important for creating a safer environment for IoT to exist in. IoT seeks to help improve people’s lives in ways that devices have never been capable of before. When devices play such a crucial role, preventing and remediating incidents become more important than ever. V2.0 of the PagerDuty API has readied the PagerDuty platform for the IoT-centric future, enabling endless possibilities of integrations that make the end-user and developer experience more pleasant, extensible, and reliable.