Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

RE: Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

Oskar — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 09:24:15 GMT

Thank you!

I am marking your earlier comment as the verified answer and I guess this ticket is closed.

RE: Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

Didrik Rokhaug — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 09:22:28 GMT

I'll suggest it to our developers, but I am not sure if it si possible.

I don't think AWS has any events for a connection attempt. It might be possible to see it from some logs, but even that I am not sure of.

RE: Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

Oskar — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 09:02:03 GMT

Is this something I can request as a feature?

We spent quite a bit of time debugging this, it ended up being something silly, the certificates we provisioned had the wrong expiry date, but it took a bit of time to debug it. It could have been a real time-saver if we could have checked the connection logs for the devices and seen that they were not allowed to connect because of credentials.

RE: Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

Didrik Rokhaug — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 14:23:40 GMT

Unfortunately, that is not possible. nRF Cloud doesn't really know about a device trying to connect, unless the connection was successful.

RE: Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

Oskar — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 15:52:20 GMT

I am sorry, I am not being clear enough.

I don't have access to the devices, they are running some production code. The only indication I have that things are not working is a flashing LED.

I am pretty sure they connect to cellular properly, because I can see the SIM card events using my SIM provider.

I am suspecting there might be something wrong with the device to cloud communication as I don't see any data.

I want to, from my work station, see if the devices try to connect to the nRF Cloud broker or not. For example by reviewing relevant logs from the MQTT broker, or by some other means.

If the certificates are bad I would expect that nothing is reported to the nRF Cloud UI, but if I could see whether or not a device attempted to connect would be very useful.

RE: Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

Didrik Rokhaug — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 15:14:53 GMT

A manual way, but very useful when debugging is with a modem trace. With the Cellular Monitor application in nRF Connect for Desktop, you can enable "Open in Wireshark", and see the packets sent and received live.

Or, in the application code, you can use the nRF Cloud event handler (registered in nrf_cloud_init()). The NRF_CLOUD_EVT_TRANSPORT_CONNECTING event will be sent when the device tries to connect to nRF Cloud. If the connection attempt fails, you will get a NRF_CLOUD_EVT_TRANSPORT_CONNECT_ERROR event. If the connection was successful, you will get NRF_CLOUD_EVT_TRANSPORT_CONNECTED and NRF_CLOUD_EVT_READY.

RE: Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

Oskar — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 13:26:24 GMT

I was thinking about observing whether or not the device attempts to make a connection to the MQTT broker. For example, if I have flashed a bad certificate onto the device, I would like to be able to see if a device attempted to connect to the MQTT broker but was denied because of a bad certificate.

It would be a way to debug errors.

RE: Monitor device connection attempts to nRF Cloud

Didrik Rokhaug — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 11:38:21 GMT

Hi,

I am not entirely sure what you are asking for.

Do you want some way for the application to know if it is connected to nRF Cloud, or some way of monitoring the connection status externally, without access to the device?

Assuming it is the last:

nRF Cloud sends connection events on a specific topic: https://docs.nrfcloud.com/APIs/MQTT/Topics.html#additional-topics-supported-by-nrf-cloud

So you can create an account device that subscribes to that topic, and keeps track of which devices are connected or not.

Best regards,

Didrik