You’ve set-up an eagle.io account and are now comfortable with creating and connecting a data source, building custom charts and configuring a dashboard (which are all nodes of different types).

Now it’s time to connect your entire monitoring network, which may include as few as 2 or as many as 40 000 sites (the largest network of devices on eagle.io).

Before jumping into the set-up, it is worth taking a moment to plan how you will structure your nodes to optimise:

• Speed — Organisation of nodes (see definitions below) to provide a fast user experience (>10 000 nodes in a workspace causes performance impacts).

• Security — Group similar nodes together under the same workspace so it's easy to share this group of nodes to a user (without having to hide nodes manually).

• Ease of use — The structured hierarchy of nodes and workspaces should make finding a particular site or dashboard intuitive. Not too many nested folders, nor too many nodes in a folder.

Organisational Nodes

We use nodes to describe items in the workpace tree in eagle.io. Nodes are either organisational (for structuring and sharing), or operational(for data or visualisations). This paper focuses on the organisational nodes.

The highest level organisational node in eagle.io is the managed account. Under this is the workspace. The workspace is the primary bucket of security that you use to share access to your operational nodes— like dashboards and sensor data.

Locations and folders are other nodes that provide additional mechanisms to structure your nodes under a workspace, but you can’t share just a location or a folder in a workspace (yet).

The operational nodes that you will store under these organisational nodes include data sources and associated parameters, attachment sources, files, custom charts, and the pièce de résistance, the dashboard. Operational nodes order alphabetically under the organisational node they are positioned under, so the use of a naming convention for all assets, and prefixes allows further organisation of your assets within an organisational node.

Organisational Nodes in Detail

The Managed Account — If you are an integrator, we recommend that you set up a managed account for each customer, unless each customer has only a small network of devices (<10) in which case it may be simpler to set these up as separate customer workspaces only.

The managed account provides a range of benefits to you and your customers:

• The workspace is now available to organise assets within a customer account,

• you can offer your clients custom branding and domains,

• you can offer trial accounts to your customers without impacting on your account capacity.

As customers of an integrator are not likely to be interested in sharing data with each other, they won’t be affected by the primary limitation of the managed account - the inability to pool data from different managed accounts using dashboards or process parameters.

If you’re the asset owner (e.g., mine, government department), only use the managed account feature if your business units are big enough that you have no logical reason to share or use data between managed accounts, because managed accounts make it hard to achieve this.

The Workspace — The workspace is the node which you can share with other users. The workspace is represented as a box in the user interface (see Figure 1). Groups of similar operational nodes should be co-located in a workspace. Usually, this is best achieved by mirroring the organisational structure of the business. The most common methods of grouping and business organisational structures are:

• Location — Common for Government departments responsible for natural resource management (e.g.,Country, states, local council)

• Function — Common for mines(Maintenance, operations, environment, public)

• Customer — Common for engineering firms running monitoring networks for their customers(Customer 1, Customer 2, Customer 3)

• Product — Common for hardware sales companies monitoring consumable levels in remote customer sites(Product 1, Product 2, Product 3)

• Project — common for research entities (Project 1, Project 2, Project 3)

Although you can hide nodes from view in a workspace, you can’t share nodes under a workspace (i.e., can’t just share a location).

Locations — Every datasource must be associated with a location. A location provides a physical location of the asset which you can define by dragging and dropping the location icon from the workspace tree to the map view, entering the coordinates under the location properties, or by referencing the location data transmitted by the device (dynamic location). Other nodes can be located under a workspace, or directly under the location node.

Folders — Folders can be used to logically group nodes under a data source, they don’t provide any additional granularity to sharing (you can’t just share a folder in a workspace). If there are more than two of any operational node type under a location, folders are an excellent way to bundle like nodes up together.