How to control your connectivity

What does it actually mean to 'control' your connectivity?

Let's start by defining what it really means to have control over your IoT connectivity.

The easiest way to understand it is by looking at what happens when you don’t have it. Unfortunately, that’s still the reality for most IoT businesses today.

Most traditional operators still dictate how and when you can make changes. You’re often forced to raise support tickets for simple requests, wait for approvals, and deal with delays that slow down your operations.

At emnify, we believe you shouldn’t need permission to manage your own devices. That's why we give you complete, instant control over how your devices behave, giving you the flexibility to manage deployments exactly the way you need.

The following sections will show you how to take control of your connectivity in seconds within the emnify portal.

1. Easily add or remove coverage zones, countries or individual  networks

We understand that your projects are fluid. Rapid scaling into new markets may be essential, while some deployments might only need seasonal coverage in a single country.

That’s why adding or removing coverage areas should be as simple and immediate as possible.

See how it's done below:

In our portal, you can make these changes directly from the Device Policies section to apply them to all devices assigned to that policy. This is ideal when you need to control connectivity for thousands of devices at once. You can also do it for individual devices within the 'Connected Devices' tab.

2. Prevent unexpected overages with Limits and Thresholds

Some gaps in connectivity control only reveal themselves over time. One of the clearest signals is when you get hit with bill shock for the first time. One of the key catalysts for bill shock is unexpected overages from over-consuming data. This may occur from roaming, firmware issues or malicious behaviour.

With traditional operators your usage data lags or is just not visible until you receive your bill. This means you are completely re-active and unable to prevent overages.

Thanks to emnify's real-time usage insights into consumption, you can set alerts and thresholds to prevent any unplanned overages in their tracks.

See how below:

Even better, you can receive real-time email notifications through our Automations feature:

Some use cases our customers already use Automations for are to:

• Notify operations instantly if a device gets blocked because its monthly data limit is reached.

• Warn support when a device exceeds its daily SMS limit.

3. Prevent, identify and resolve issues faster with real-time insights

As we have already alluded, being able to manage your consumption is dependent on the availability and your ability to access real-time information about your usage and network performance. Only then can you take the necessary steps to curb consumption.

This is exactly the same for troubleshooting. Only by having real-time visibility of how your connectivity is performing can you determine, if and how something has gone wrong and how you can address it.

The emnify portal shows all device real-time usage on the first page you visit (your dashboard). For example, within the example below, the fact usage completely disappears for one hour from 12PM would immediately highlight to us that there is an issue.

By digging down into our connected devices, we can also see this trend highlighted at a device level as highlighted shown below with our 'EV Charge Station 0003':

As we can see at the device level our consumed data also drops off at 12PM. To investigate further we can then head to the 'Events' tab for this device:

Conclusion

Controlling your connectivity means more than just monitoring data usage. In fact, many providers don’t even give you that level of visibility.

True control means having the ability to see what’s happening in real time, automate actions when issues occur, and make immediate changes without waiting on anyone else.

With emnify, control is not limited or delayed. It’s built into the platform, giving you the power to shape your connectivity strategy in real time, reduce risk, increase agility, and keep your devices performing at their best anywhere in the world.

See it for yourself. Leave your details, for one of our IoT experts to show you how you can take full control of your device connectivity live in the emnify platform.