What is the Simulator?

The Pratexo Streaming Data Simulator (or Simulator for short) is a tool that can be used for testing an architecture in a virtual environment. 

Every Architecture can have multiple deployments. There are 2 types of Deployments - a Physical Deployment (for actual hardware) and a Simulated Deployment (for deploying the architecture in a Virtual Cloud environment).

These are the steps that occur automatically to create the Simulator (no action is required by the user):

• Create a deployment in a Cloud (GCP is currently supported)
• Select the number of Compute Nodes in each Node Group
• Select which Virtual Machines (VMs) to use for each Node Group (multiple sizes of VMs are supported
• Deploy the Architecture onto every VM representing every Compute Node by running the installation plan on the VMs.
• Create a Node-Red Simulator that has the following "nodes"
  • A node in Node-Red for every VM that represents the Mqtt queue on the Compute Node
  • A node for every Device Type in the Architecture representing every data source being collected 

Every Simulated Deployment has its own Simulator. The Simulator is created every time a Deployment is processed by clicking on the "Deploy" button in the Deployment View. 

• As soon as the Deploy button is clicked, a listing will appear in the Deployment View. 
• The listing has a "Status" field. 
• You can click on the status field and view the progress of the deployment
• A window showing the status of the Simulated deployment as well as the detailed logs will appear. 
• Once the Simulated Deployment process completes, a link will appear for the simulator.

See "How to Access the Simulator" in the helpcenter for details on how to access the Simulator.

The Tabs in the Simulator

When you open the Simulator you will see an instance of Node-Red with a number of tabs. 

• Each tab represents one of the compute nodes
• There is a special tab on the left that is for Starting/Stopping the data simulator

The "nodes" in each of the Tabs in the Simulator

Each tab in Node Red represents one of the compute nodes. A tab has the following nodes in it:

• To the right you will see a node representing the Mqtt queue for the compute node.
• To the left you will see "Start" and "Stop" nodes for starting and stopping a simulated data flow into the compute node.
• In between you will see nodes representing each of the Device Types specified in the architecture. 
  • For example, if you defined a Device Type of Temperature Sensor in the architecture, you will see a node labeled Temperature Sensor.

How to generate streaming data in the Simulator

The purpose of the simulator is to allow you to test the Architecture in a virtual environment. To do this, you can simulate data streams from the Device Types and "push" them into the Compute Nodes and then see if it is processed correctly by the Architecture - perhaps by viewing the output of any filtering or analytics performed on the data in dashboards or reports generated by the architecture.

• Click on any of the Device Type nodes
• A properties panel will appear on the right
• There are many properties you can configure to generate simulated data, for example
  • Frequency - how frequently should the simulator generate data 
  • Function - what function should be used to generate the data, for example, linear, exponential, random, etc.
• Click on a start node to start generating the data
  • you can click on the start/stop node on a tab representing a Compute Node to start/stop data flowing into that single node
  • you can click on the start/stop node on the "global" tab to start/stop data flowing into all of the nodes.