Significant delay in receiving messages from Estimote Cloud

LTE Beacons
1

Greetings,

Since the weekend we’ve experienced lags between Estimote Cloud and our endpoint. This delay is now exceeding 55 minutes from the time that the packet is enqueued and seen inside of the Cloud Event Log in the Estimote IDE to the time we receive it at our destination.

Our Estimote Micro-App Code, our Estimote Cloud Code, and our backend has not been changed since January 21st which was only a minor change to enable GPS by default. Additionally, I was able to reproduce the problem on two DEV Kit LTE Beacons which utilized a separate datacenter (DigitalOcean) and saw the same delays within both environments.

Here is an example received at 21:36:30Z - >55 minute delay

{
  event: {
    identifier: '<Redacted for privacy>',
    type: 'pos',
    enqueuedAt: 2021-03-26T20:38:25.456Z,
    payload: {
      lat: <Redacted for privacy>,
      long: <Redacted for privacy>,
      alt: 70,
      head: 325.9333190917969,
      speed: 0,
      prec: 1.2999999523162842,
      diff: 1.2725249528884888,
      ts: 1616791107000,
      sats: 9,
      fix3d: false
    }
  }
}

These delays have caused us to have to bring down our campus shuttle tracker as the position being reported is far too old to use for trip planning.

Regarding the test and production beacons, all are running 0.2.18 and we are using the Cloud code below to send the position data.

const request = require('request-promise');
module.exports = async function (event) {
    const assets = event.payload;
     await request.post(
       'https://<Redacted for privacy>', {json: true, body: {event}});
}

We do believe this issue lies in the Estimote Cloud and it is not an LTE Beacon, LTE-M Service, or GPS issue as the near real-time location is being displayed within the Estimote IDE and on the Map which is built into the IDE.

We also do not believe this is on our side as we have tested our end points within AWS US-East-1 as well as DigitalOcean NYE2&3.

Please advise or direct us to someone who can help find the root cause of this delay so that we may restore service.

Thanks,
Jeremy

2

Can someone @Estimote please take a look at this and respond? Our shuttle tracking system has been offline for a week now. The time delay between when a position message is available in the Estimote IDE and when we received it via the Estimote Cloud code is currently averaging about 42 minutes which is unusable for real-time tracking.

Jeremy

3

I can’t offer much help, but it seems that Estimote is on life support at this point, because of the pandemic response gutting retail businesses across the entire world.

They have cancelled all of their beacons that have on-board JavaScript, including the LTE and AI beacons, and have pivoted to providing contact-tracing beacon solutions for businesses.

It’s hard to say if they’ll spend any resources fixing anything to do with Estimote Cloud, for now.

4

This is really unfortunate to hear @nhooey. I really enjoy working with their technology and hope they can make it through the pandemic!

5

Hi Jasper!

We’re working on preparing a solution for your use case. I’ll let you know as soon as we receive any suggestion from our engineers.

Thank you for your patience.

Miriam Pajdak
Community Manager in Estimote