AWS IOT: Get Thing connection status

Question

I currently have a bunch or things registered in the AWS IOT console. i am building a web-page that will list things and display attributes from each things shadow. i am struggling to understand how do i know if a thing is currently online in (near) real time. I am retrieving the things using the PHP SDK

IotClient->listThings()

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I am displaying their attributes using

IotDataPlaneClient->getThingShadow()

and

IotDataPlaneClient->updateThingShadow()

to update the shadow and this is all working fine.

But i have no way of knowing Whether or not a thing is online at a the moment.

Answer 1

Use Fleet Indexing to track status of connectivity.

The information indexed per Thing:
{name:connectivity.timestamp, type:Number}, {name:connectivity.version, type:Number}, {name:connectivity.connected, type:Boolean}

*Remember the clientId used to connect must also exist as a Thing in the Thing registry.

Answer 2

a bit expensive solution I use: I have 2 lambda that writing on the shadow when the device connects or disconnects, looking at the topic $aws/events/presence/connected/+ / $aws/events/presence/disconnected/+