Virtual Things

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In case you don't yet have a real machine that can publish data to Servitly, or to an IoT platform integrated with Servitly, you can take advantage of the Virtual Thing concept, which can automatically publish data for a thing registered in the DPS you are configuring.

With this feature, you can start defining dashboards for machines that you are going to connect later on.

A Virtual Thing is based on a data source which can be one of the following types.

CSV File

A CSV file is read, and the data is published to a target thing.

Thing Data Mirroring

All data published on one thing are mirrored on another one.

Creating a Virtual Thing

To add a new Virtual Thing, you should:

  1. Enter the Integrations / Virtual Things page.

  2. Press the Add Virtual Thing button.

  3. Provide the required information.

  4. Press the Save button and edit the additional information.

For more details about how to configure a Virtual Thing, according to the desired data source refer to the following articles:

Running a Virtual Thing

When the Virtual Thing has been configured, you can start the data publishing. In the Virtual Thing list, you can click on the 3-dots menu, and then click on Start.


When the Virtual Thing is running, you can Stop or Pause it.

In case of CSV Data Source, when you stop, data publishing is restored to the first row of the CSV. Instead, pausing maintains the index of the reached row.

Once started, a Virtual Thing continues to publish data until it is stopped or paused.

Limitations

  • For each environment you can have at maximum of 10 Virtual Things running in parallel.

  • Depending on the type of data source, there are other limitations.